Michael Purugganan, an associate professor of genetics at NC State, has been awarded a five-year, $1.35 million grant to research the blooming of plants.
Purugganan is part of a team of researchers from Brown University, Kansas State, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology that will focus on what forces trigger flowering.
“We want to find out how parts of the genome responsible for controlling flowering time are evolving in Arabidopis (mustard seed),” Purugganan said. “We want a better understanding of how plants flower, and this may help us learn more about flowering in crops.”
The grant is from the National Science Foundation.
