AutoMods: Improving plant fitness and health using chemical genetics

Autophagy is a major catabolic pathway in eukaryotic cells that involves the removal and recycling of damaged or unwanted components and plays fundamental roles in stress responses, cell death regulation and longevity. It is linked to human diseases including diabetes, neurodegeneration and cancer.

Autophagy is equally important in plants and is associated with agronomically significant traits such as growth, stress resistance and yield. Despite the importance of autophagy, the biochemical signalling pathways are still being unravelled.

Chemical modulation presents an attractive means to manipulate the pathway without the use of GMOs and novel chemicals can also be leveraged to elucidate autophagy signalling mechanisms.

Unfortunately, commercially available modulators have pleiotropic and off-target effects and so there is a need for additional options with high specificity.

Therefore, this project will employ chemical genetics to identify and develop compounds that specifically modulate autophagy in plants.

The work has three major objectives, O1; a high-throughput screen of small organic molecules to identify autophagy modulators, O2; the identification of their mechanistic targets and O3; evaluation of their potential for agricultural and biomedical applications.

The work will utilize innovative strategies to reveal new insights into autophagy signalling and provide additional autophagy modulating compounds with widespread applicability.