Effects of Dof1 Transcription Factors on Tomatoes

Student Name: Annabel Chem

UCD Department: Plant Sciences

UCD Mentor: Dr. Diane Beckles

Nitrogen is a nutrient essential to plant growth and development. Improving a plant’s ability to uptake and metabolize nitrogen is essential to preserving plant productivity and agricultural viability under low nitrogen growing conditions, but is difficult to achieve due to the complicated nature of the nitrogen assimilation pathway. Because transcription factors often regulates the coordinated expression of genes involved in a pathway, modification of transcription factors is a powerful and promising approach towards modifying complicated pathways. This experiment focuses on the effects that the Dof1 transcription factor has on nitrogen assimilation in tomato plants in hopes to design a tomato that can maintain high crop yield without requiring added nitrogen from fertilizers. Plant length, fresh weight, dry weight, root length, and PEP-Carboxylase expression were higher under low nitrogen conditions in plants overexpressing Dof1, showing that the Dof1’s role in regulating nitrogen metabolism in plants has a positive impact on nitrogen assimilation in transgenic tomato plants under low nitrogen conditions. Although this project evaluates the NUE of a transgenic tomato plant, the ultimate goal is to create a non-transgenic line that has similar properties.