Hailing Jin received a prestigious 5-year Maximizing Investigators Research Award (MIRA R35) from the NIH on “Cross-kingdom RNA communications between plant and fungal pathogens”, for a total of $1.89M. MIRA is designed to increase the efficiency of NIH funding by providing investigators with greater stability and flexibility, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for...

A prime example of across organisms and borderless scientific activities in IIGB was achieved by Thomas Eulgem and Karine Le Roch, with a well-executed collaboration bringing together researchers working in very different areas of genome biology. The project was initiated in Thomas Eulgem’s lab as the PI on the critical roles of the chromatin-associated Arabidopsis...

Xuemei Chen, Robert Jinkerson, and Meng Chen received an NSF grant to establish a transformative RNA sequencing technology for studying plastids. The plant cell stores its DNA in not only the nucleus but also the plant-specific organelles, the plastids. Plastid DNA can be transcriptionally programmed to instruct the differentiation of plastids into diverse types, such...

Yanran Li, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering, has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program for a project to discover plant natural products of potential medicinal value and their biosynthesis through reprograming the plant innate immunity. Li’s research seeks to engineer and redirect plant...