Marisa Otegui
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Plant Science & Agriculture
Plants constantly recycle their own parts. When leaves age or face stress, cells break down proteins and other components and ship the nutrients to new growth and seeds.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Biology
- Topics
autophagy
nutrient recycling
nutrient remobilization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Analyze how autophagy, the cell's self-digestion recycling system, affects recycling in different photosynthetic maize leaf cell types, using pooled cell-type proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.
- Define how chloroplasts, the organelles that run photosynthesis, are remodeled and degraded by different autophagy-related pathways, analyzed at the level of individual chloroplast types.
- Identify gene regulatory networks controlling cellular recycling in maize leaf cell types by integrating omics data at the cell-type, single-cell and chloroplast-type levels.
- Experimentally test predicted metabolites and transcription factors, proteins that switch genes on or off, as regulators of autophagy and nutrient mobilization in maize.
More about the research
A key recycling route is autophagy, literally "self-eating," in which cells package unwanted material and digest it. Autophagy shapes traits farmers care about, such as how well crops use fertilizer, how they allocate carbon, seed quality, yield, and stress tolerance. Yet little is known about how autophagy works in different cell types within a crop leaf, or what backup systems take over when it fails.
Why it matters
Crops that recycle and move nutrients more efficiently could need less fertilizer and give better yields under both normal and stressful growing conditions. By identifying the genes and molecules that control nutrient recycling in specific maize leaf cells, this work could give plant breeders and engineers targets for improving nutrient-use efficiency in crops.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohammad Rahman
Alabama State University, AL·Plant Science & Agriculture
Screen diverse quinoa genotypes under contrasting nitrogen conditions to identify varieties that stay productive with reduced nitrogen fertilizer.
John Fowler
Oregon State University, OR·Plant Science & Agriculture
Measure gene-specific contributions to pollen fitness for several hundred maize genes, using fluorescently marked Ds-GFP insertion mutants and the EarVision automated imaging and computer vision phenotyping system.
Linda Hanley-Bowdoin
North Carolina State University, NC·Plant Science & Agriculture
Define and visualize DNA replication initiation regions and measure genome-wide transcription rates in B73 maize root tip meristems, using in vivo labeling of newly copied DNA and flow sorting of nuclei.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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