Nicholas Provart is recipient of a $2.5M grant from NSERC to build tools that visualize a healthy future for our plants as part of the C-SPIRIT team.
C-SPIRIT is a global project that aims to address the grand challenge of stabilizing food production through harnessing natural chemical diversity harboured in plants and microbes.
Provart, a professor in Cell & Systems Biology, will be responsible for data science activities at C-SPIRIT, including tool development for exploring high content data and interactive database management.
Their research will enhance the usefulness of known plant compounds by providing for bulk synthesis, ensuring efficacy in the field and verifying safe levels of use. Novel compounds will be identified chemically, and their genetic source pinpointed. These discoveries will reveal new pathways to plant resilience.
C-SPIRIT (Center for Sustainable Plant Innovation and Resilience through International Teamwork) convenes plant, microbial, computational, and social scientists from Canada, South Korea, the UK, Japan, and the US.
The Canadian unit of C-SPIRIT is funded by NSERC and will be co-led by Provart of University of Toronto and by Prof Olivia Wilkins of University of Manitoba.
As the metabolites identified by C-SPIRIT are coming from within the ecosystem, they will produce green chemistry solutions for current problems: promoting robust physiological responses will enhance crop resilience against environmental stresses like drought and heat waves; enhancing nutrient uptake will minimize external fertilization; improving plant immune responses will protect crops against increasing pest and pathogen load.
Visualizing diverse datasets is the expertise that Provart brings to C-SPIRIT with his internationally recognized Bio-Analytic Resource for Plant Biology (BAR).
One important aspect of the C-SPIRIT effort is being able to identify and visualize metabolite and gene expression changes in plants under different conditions, organs, and cell types. Knowing this ensures the correct product will be used in the correct tissue.
BAR facilitates this analysis by collating data from the geographic level to the atomic scale. BAR incorporates the latest AI tools and is designated as a Global Core Biodata Resource, reflecting its importance to the global science community.
Provart is enthusiastic about the possibilities for this initiative: “The C-SPIRIT effort really aims to leverage the incredible chemical diversity of plants and microbes to identify and produce natural solutions that stabilize and enhance crop productivity under more expected adverse climates, to support next-generation agriculture that is both sustainable and regenerative”
Congratulations, Professor Provart!