PI: Alan Jones (UNC Chapel Hill)

Co-PIs: Corbin Jones, Andrew Leakey

Funding Source: NSF

Award Number: 2034777

Our long-term goal is to determine the rules by which organisms respond to noisy, variable signals and how evolution influences the universality of these rules. The example we chose for this project is dynamic light in a plant canopy. We hypothesize that the light dynamics—switching between low and high levels light over varying periods of time experienced by an organism in its environment shapes the tempo and mode of its light signal detection system. This light dynamic covers several time scales from flickering (seconds) caused by the wind in the leaves to shadows (minutes) to the diel cycle (hours). Here we assess how adaptation to dynamic light shapes the physiology, development, genetics, and evolution of grasses. Our approach integrates genomics and systems engineering across several organizational levels.