Associate Professor

Ph.D. Purdue University, 1997

Postdoc: University of California at Berkeley

huq@mail.utexas.edu

Office Bio 21B

(512) 471-9848

Huq lab home page

 Light is not only essential for photosynthetic energy production, but also functions as one of the most important environmental factors that affect plant growth and development. A dark grown plant has a long hypocotyl, closed cotyledons and unopened hooks (called etiolated plant). Light dramatically changes the growth and development including shortening of hypocotyls, expansion and greening of cotyledons (called de-etiolated plant) through changes in gene expression. Our research is aimed at understanding the mechanisms of light signal transduction, specifically those pathways mediated by the phytochrome (phy) family of sensory photoreceptors that absorb light in the red and far-red region of the spectrum. The phy system, consisting of five members in Arabidopsis (phyA-phyE), controls almost every aspect of the plant life cycle including seed germination, de-etiolation and flowering time. To understand early phy signaling events, phy interacting factors, such as PIF1, have been isolated and characterized. PIF1 is a basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factor that interacts strongly with the biologically active form of phyA and phyB. PIF1 overexpression and pif1 mutants showed defective seedling de-etiolation including, aberrant hypocotyl elongation and developmentally regulated loss of greening, suggesting that PIF1 is a key regulator of the phy-mediated seedling de-etiolation. A combination of biochemical, genetic, molecular and functional genomic approaches will be used to understand the following goals using Arabidopsis as a model system: 

i) Understand the mechanism of PIF1 function in seedling de-etiolation.

ii) Regulation of PIF1 activity by light signals.

iii) Regulation of the greening process by light signals.

Selected Publications