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Research experience for undergraduate and high school students
Undergraduate research: We welcome motivated undergraduate students to join us to dissect plant immune signaling. We have designed two genetic screens (aggie-luc and bak-to-life) specifically tailored for undergraduate students. Understand immune signal integration by a “aggie-luc” screen All living organisms must integrate and disseminate environmental signals to generate appropriate cellular responses. The molecular mechanisms by which signal…
Outreach and Conferences
2018-2021 Texas A&M Genome Editing Symposium Graduate student Mr. Brendan Mormile has organized four consecutive Texas A&M Genome Editing Symposia since 2018 with a huge success every year! During the ASPB Plant Biology 2020 virtual conference, Brendan Mormile also instructed the workshop entitled “gRNA Design and Off-Target Minimization for Genome Editing with CRISPR/Cas9”. The intentions…
Coordination of Plant Immunity, Growth, and Development
Plant immune receptors PRRs are receptor-like kinases (RLKs) and receptor-like proteins (RLPs), many of which are implicated in sensing extrinsic and intrinsic signals, and govern diverse cellular responses. The signaling pathways mediated by leucine-rich repeat RLKs and RLPs converge at a small group of RLKs, namely somatic embryogenesis receptor kinases (SERKs), via ligand-induced heterodimerization and…
Functional and Translational Genomics in Cotton Disease Resistance
An important goal of our research is to translate knowledge from studying model plants to improve crop agricultural performance. We have developed various functional genomic, cellular, and biochemical platforms in cotton, which serves as a significant source of fiber, feed, and oil products, to understand stress signaling and identify essential components to improve cotton resilience…
Regulation of Plant Autoimmunity
Immune regulators are often crucial in maintaining cellular homeostasis. Defects or over-activation of defense could induce autoimmunity, ultimately leading to cell death. To understand the mechanisms underlying immunity-related cell death, we have developed various RNAi-based screens for cell death suppressors caused by mutations in key immune regulators. This unbiased and highly efficient screen is based…
Immunomodulatory Phytocytokines in Plant Immunity
Microbial infection induces the expression of a large number of secreted peptide genes with unknown functions. We recently revealed that two groups of small secreted peptides, SCOOPs and SCREWs, function as immunomodulatory phytocytokines in plants and identified their corresponding receptors. We are interested in some key questions to advance our understanding of phytocytokine-mediated immunity with…
Activation and Attenuation of Plant PRR Complexes and Signaling
As an intrinsic defense mechanism against invading pathogens, hosts have evolved cell surface-resident pattern recognition receptors (PRRs). These evolutionally convergent receptors are instrumental in recognizing diverse pathogens, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites, and insects. We are taking biochemical and molecular genetic approaches to study how the PRR complexes are activated and relay the signaling pathways…
Transcriptional, Posttranscriptional and Posttranslational Regulation of Plant Immunity
Plants have evolved two tiers of immune receptors to detect infections: cell surface-resident PRRs sensing microbial signatures and intracellular nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins recognizing pathogen effectors. We have developed sensitive genetic screens to identify Arabidopsis Genes Governing Immune gene Expression (AGGIEs) that regulate plant PRR- and/or NLR-mediated immunity. Genetic and biochemical analyses of…
Understanding and Improving Cotton Abiotic Stress Adaptation
With global climate change, the tension between crop production and water supply is intensifying, and drought stress is a prominent limiting factor to crop production. This problem is particularly important to cotton since more than half of global cotton production is from high water stress areas. Water deficit not only reduces the cotton yield stability…