QnAs with Gloria M. Coruzzi

摘要

For plants, nitrogen is a key nutrient responsible for growth and development. Farms throughout the world rely on fertilizers rich in the element to increase production. However, fertilizer use carries a high environmental impact, and reducing fertilizer use remains a challenging goal, especially as the global population grows. Uncovering the genome-wide regulatory networks that control nitrogen use efficiency has been the research focus of Gloria M. Coruzzi, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Biology at New York University’s (NYU) Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. Coruzzi also helped develop VirtualPlant (http://virtualplant.bio.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/vpweb/), a software platform that allows scientists to study the interaction of gene networks in several plant species, including the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana as well as food crops. PNAS recently spoke to Coruzzi, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, about her current research.