Modelling hormone signalling pathways underpinning responses to environmental conditions

Project description

Food security is the most pressing issue of the century – we desperately need to increase crop production to feed the growing world population in a sustainable manner. Understanding how hormones regulate a plant responses to environmental conditions represents a crucial target to accelerating the development of high-yielding crops that can withstand climate changes.

This PhD will involve developing and analysing ODE models to investigate how post-translational modifications affect the outputs of hormone signalling pathways within plants. These post-translational modifications play a major role in adaptation to environmental conditions, such as plant root branching in response to water availability (as published in Science by our collaborators - see details below). We will first model both mechanisms of the modication and the signalling network dynamics within single cells, using coupled systems of ODEs. These networks will then be embedded within multicellular geometries to create models to understand how the network dynamics affect patterns within the biological tissue, such as those that control root branching. These models can be studied either numerically or analytically (for example, using asymptotic analysis).

The mathematical models will help interpret data generated through the SumoCode project (www.sumocode.org) in collaboration with molecular biologists Prof Ari Sadanadom at Durham University and Prof Malcolm Bennett at the University of Nottingham.