Research Projects

Iron (Fe) is an essential micronutrient in plants, but its poor bioavailability under alkaline or high pH conditions makes it a crucial nutrient to study. When plants are exposed to Fe deficiency, they exhibit numerous growth and developmental defects. To cope with this situation, plants developed two mechanisms to acquire rhizospheric Fe: strategy I in non-grasses and strategy II in graminaceous plants. Rice has a combined strategy for Fe uptake under Fe-deficient conditions, which mainly involves basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcriptional factors, hormones, and regulatory proteins. Recent research has focused on post-translational control of iron homeostasis, focusing on the role of histone modification under Fe-deficient conditions and its effect on the transcriptional control of Fe homeostasis. H3K4me3, associated with almost 70% of various stress responses activating genes, is associated with almost 70% of various stress responses. The objective of this study is to screen H3K4me3 targets under Fe deficiency in rice to better understand the Fe homeostatic pathway. The rice variety, IR64, will be exposed to Fe-sufficient and -deficient conditions for 14 days, followed by further Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) using H3K4me3 antibody and sequencing. This will allow us to identify global H3K4me3 targets under Fe deficiency. Comparing identified targets from ChIP-seq with existing transcriptional data of rice under Fe-deficient and -sufficient conditions will allow us to further understand how and where Fe deficiency affects chromatin dynamics and its effect on the transcriptional network of Fe deficiency response. This will open new directions for conducting Fe homeostasis research and develop new cropping strategies for sustainable agricultural practices.