Team:SECA NZ/Description

Description

With an ever-growing world population, having sustainable and reliable crops for food production is becoming increasingly important. However, every year millions of dollars’ worth of produce is damaged, lost, or never produced because of frosts. Frost damages new shoots and buds of crop plants through the formation of ice crystals within the tissues, which rupture the surrounding cells. As a result, new plant and fruit growth is severely inhibited. Despite promising research into frost resistance mechanisms, the majority of producers still utilise costly, and often ineffective, traditional methods of frost avoidance. Our team seeks to introduce a variety of frost resistance genes into the model organisms Arabidopsis thaliana and Escherichia coli for characterisation. This will provide insight into the varying ability of frost resistance genes to protect model organisms at sub-zero temperatures, ultimately leading to the production of frost tolerant crops.

We are using Arabidopsis and E.coli to test both the function of these mechanisms and their protein output.

We hope to create a pathway for future research to get frost-resistant plants into the ground in the coming years.