EXPLORING PLANT PRIMARY AND SPECIALIZED METABOLISM FOR METABOLIC ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

The major goal is to understand the regulation of plant metabolism from different perspectives, such that this knowledge can be used to produce valuable products in selected crops to support resilience and sustainability in agriculture. The specific objectives are:Generate fully edible space tomato. To make aerial tomato organs edible for human consumption, trichomes will be removed and the levels of toxic SGAs lowered. For animal feed supplement, it is not important to remove trichomes because the plant material will be further processed. We aim to obtain dehydrotomatine and a-tomatine leaf and stem levels of about 4 and 40 mg/kg fresh weight, respectively, which will render the aerial tomato organs non-toxic to mammals. Our metabolic engineering strategies are aimed at not only lowering the SGA levels but also minimizing accompanying molecular and visible phenotypes. The resulting space tomato will be thoroughly tested for metabolic and visible phenotypes by using multi-omics approaches. Ideally, the levels of other metabolites and transcripts should not change more than 2-fold, which is within the observed natural variation.Determine the source of chemical energy in developing peanut embryos. This Objective is aimed at addressing a very basic research question about C and N partitioning in a non-photosynthetic system. By using SME-MFA, we will determine which pathways are active and a source of reductant in developing peanut embryos grown under different N conditions. Then we will make predictions about expression of which genes we need to alter and how to obtain desired oil content in soybean seeds, which will provide a basis for another proposal. The goal is to double oil content from 20 to 40% in soybean seeds.