Nitzan Shabek, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Biology, has received a $837,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The five-year award will support Shabek’s research into elucidating the sensing mechanism of an emerging and unique class of plant hormones. Additionally, as an integral part of the research activities, this project will create a unique teaching platform and outreach program to encourage young students to pursue knowledge in STEM.
Plants can perceive and react to light across a wide spectrum. New research from Prof. Nitzan Shabek’s laboratory in the Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences shows how plants can respond to blue light in particular.
“Plants can see much better than we can,” Shabek said.
In a collaborative study published today in Nature Plants, researchers report fundamental first steps towards eliminating a transgenic approach to gene editing
Keith Fraga won a Office of Science Graduate Student Research award, which gives Ph.D. students the opportunity to conduct research at a DOE national laboratory. Mary-Francis LaPorte won the DOE’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, which helps train next-generation leaders in computational science.
Of the major food crops, only rice is currently able to survive flooding. Thanks to new research, that could soon change -- good news for a world in which rains are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
In a new publication in The Plant Cell — “Chloroplast Outer Membrane β-Barrel Proteins Use Components of the General Import Apparatus” — authors Philip Day, Steven Theg, and Kentaro Inoue, all at University of California, Davis, determined how β-barrel proteins are sorted to the correct location in plant chloroplast envelopes, which have two membranes.
Plant Biology Graduate Group student Leonardo Jo thought his anxiety was normal, an expected part of the graduate school experience. His peers grappled with similar issues: imposter syndrome, researcher pressures and financial insecurity, to name a few. And they all seemed to suffer in silence at the cost of their own mental health.
In a study appearing in Nature Communications, researchers identified the function of a key protein that regulates plant immunity. The fundamental research could eventually lead to agricultural practices capable of endowing crops with broad-spectrum resistance against pathogens.
During his career, Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar has published more than 100 research papers and reviews and has received many accolades. For his excellence in molecular plant pathology research, Dinesh-Kumar recently received the Noel T. Keen Award from The American Phytopathological Society.
Scientists have successfully sequenced the coast redwood and giant sequoia genomes, completing the first major milestone of a five-year project to develop the tools necessary to study these forests’ genomic diversity.
