Systems Approaches to Analysing Plant Stress Responses

Global food security is the major challenge for biological sciences in the coming years. As plants cannot avoid environmental stress they have developed response networks to alleviate their impact. These networks are likely to be complex as they involve detection and signaling components as well as many feedback mechanisms to fine tune their output to avoid extreme consequences to the plant. To complicate the issue, at any one time a plant may be exposed to multiple stresses, both biotic and abiotic, that will alter the output from the stress response networks induced. However, there is likely to be a significant overlap in the gene regulatory networks mediating response to environmental stress. We are taking a Systems Biology modeling approach to begin to elucidate the transcriptional response networks that underlie plant responses to stress. We have carried out high resolution timecourse microarray analyses on plant responses to biotic (Pseudomonas syringae, Botrytis cinerea) and abiotic (high light and drought) stress and developmental senescence and used Variational Baysian State Space Modeling to infer transcriptional response networks. This has allowed us to define a high level network regulating responses to multiple stresses and we are validating and extending this network.