Zhong received a WashU Global Incubator Seed Grant for research on plant thermal stress. Her new NSF grant will allow her to take a closer look at what happens when plants face nutrient stress such as nitrogen deficiencies.
Cultivated plants provide people with food, fuel and medicine. But crops also face many types of stresses that threaten their growth and yields. Biologist Xuehua Zhong in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has won a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research aimed at developing more resilient crops that can adapt to changing environmental conditions and support sustainable agriculture.
Zhong and her team are working to understand how plants use biomolecular condensates — microscale compartments in cells that concentrate proteins and nucleic acids — to sense their environment and respond in the right ways to achieve fitness, resilience and productivity.
Zhong previously focused much of her work on understanding how plants cope with heat stress, with the ultimate goal of engineering plants that are more resilient to climate change. In 2024, she received a WashU Global Incubator Seed Grant for research on plant thermal stress. Her new NSF grant will allow her to take a closer look at what happens when plants face nutrient stress such as nitrogen deficiencies.
“Plants and humans use different strategies for dealing with stressors,” said Zhong, who is the Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar and the program director for plant and microbial biosciences at WashU. “Plants must find a way to deal with heat one day and then drought the next day, or another kind of stress like nutrient stress. They need to quickly switch between their adaptive tools.”