- Demonstrate that a focus on plant performance characters will reveal knockout phenotypes
- Quantify phenotypes and phenotypic plasticity to environmental variation (e.g., sufficient vs. deficient nutrients, growth chambers vs. greenhouse) emphasizing ecological realism of treatments
- Test hypotheses that knockout effects are related to gene family size
- Test the hypothesis that the effect of knockouts depends on the gene ontology of the locus
- Study how undergraduates’ involvement in this distributed research network influences their access to social capital within the scientific community
To achieve these goals, faculty, and the undergraduate students:
- Have developed a set of shared phenotyping protocols emphasizing performance-related traits
- Are phenotyping thousands of T-DNA lines in at least one standardized growth environment (check out the database for currently available data)
- Are collecting phenotype data from a large subset of lines across multiple environments
- Quantifying the number of T-DNA insertions in each line to screen out multiple inserts
- Enhancing cyberinfastructure to support communication, collaboration, and cross-institutional data sharing and analysis among undergraduates and faculty
- Conducting and analyzing a series of in-depth interviews from undergraduate interns participating in the network to explore how they exploit the network as they advance in their training