Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** global climatic changes are…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** global climatic changes are predicted to provoke worldwide extreme environmental conditions, limiting crop growth and productivity. The highly frequent flooding events are forcing the global climate challenges on the agriculture sector. Addressing these challenges through smart-agricultural-practices is not always a sustainable solution, so there is a growing need to identify and/or breed stress-tolerant cultivars/rootstocks to maintain sustainability in the context of climate change. In the current project, the muscadine grapevine, a major fruit crop of economic importance, has emerged as a model perennial fruit crop for studying root-hypoxia tolerance. Our research suggested that muscadines could respond to the environmental stress stimuli by rebuilding their defense mechanism and system architecture, modifying whole vine strategies to avoid the environmental impact while maintaining productivity. Our primary research finding has suggested how vines potentially perceive the alert signal and how they govern the subsequent changes in growth behavior. IT is proposed that grapevines utilize the antioxidative defense mechanism to permit flexible and appropriate modulation of plant growth in response to the changes in natural environments. These different key players work mutually and/or independently to coordinate the vine's decision if exposed to unfavorable environmental circumstances. The target of this project is to identify molecular mechanisms and metabolome architecture underlying root-hypoxia tolerance/resistance in muscadine. Given the existing gaps in our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying grapevine-waterlogging responses, we aim to answer the following question: how can we move towards a more integrative definition of grapevine stress tolerance?