Specialized or secondary metabolism is a collection of pathways and small molecules that, while beneficial to an organism, are not strictly necessary for survival. Plants use secondary metabolites to, among other things, attract pollinators, defend against biotic and abiotic stressors, and form symbioses. Natural products from plants have seen an...
Many research projects suffer from limited data causing poor statistical analysis or limited results. The movement to high throughput methods has been building for many years and cross many different disciplines. Lots of these methods start out using pathways that generate large amounts of data but have limited methods to...
Rice is an important crop that feeds almost half the world population. As climate change models predict floods, drought and extreme temperatures in rice production areas, the need to better understand the genetic basis of adaptation and tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses is vital to sustain our food supply....
The overall focus of this thesis is on the distribution of specific lipids and membrane proteins of the external and internal membranes of plant cells, in the context of the roles that those lipids and proteins may play in microbe-plant interactions. The work includes the development of several new tools,...
Advancements in molecular biology and computer science have enabled researchers the ability to investigate the transcriptome – the quantification of an organism’s RNA transcripts in response to its environment on a system wide scale. The collective chapters of this thesis utilize high-throughput RNA sequencing, which produces hundreds of millions of...