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...
Yinsheng Wang, a UC Riverside distinguished professor of chemistry, has won a highly competitive research grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, or NIEHS. Wang was one of five scientists nationally to receive the Revolutionizing Innovative, Visionary Environmental Health Research, or RIVER, award which provides grant funding to mid-career and established researchers and...
Scientists are closer to gaining the upper hand on a disease that has wiped out citrus orchards across the globe. New models of the bacterium linked to the disease reveal control methods that were previously unavailable. In this case, researchers created the first models of the bacterium associated with Huanglongbing or HLB, also known as...
Caroline Roper, an associate professor of plant pathology; and Shou-Wei Ding, a professor of plant pathology; are among the 2020 award winners from an international professional organization of plant pathologists. The American Phytopathological Society, or APS, regularly honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the science of plant pathology. Roper and Ding were presented...
A research team led by Jikui Song and Rong Hai at the University of California, Riverside, has outlined how the Zika virus, which constituted an epidemic threat in 2016, suppresses the immune system of its host. The study appears in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. The research involved first solving the crystal structure of a...
IIGB is extremely proud to announce that Katie Dehesh has been elected to serve as ASPB President in 2021, with her President-Elect duties starting October 2020. Katie first joined the American Society of Plant Biologists in 1998 and is currently serving on the Hoagland Award Committee. From 2013 to 2019, she also served on the...
It’s likely that billions of people are unaware they have been infected with parasitic worms. A UC Riverside scientist has won $1.8 million to try and understand why. The National Institutes of Health granted an Outstanding Investigator Award to Adler Dillman, an assistant professor of parasitology, so he can shed light on the mystery of...
There’s some good news in the long-running battle against a disease that’s devastated Florida’s signature crop, oranges. Researchers are developing tools to help control citrus greening, a disease that has killed thousands of acres of orange and grapefruit trees. One of the most promising treatments was recently developed in a fruit most people have never...
UCR faculty, including Manuela Martins-Green have recently published papers on their current research in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology and in Nature: Scientific Reports
Rasmussen and colleagues discovered the protein called TANGLED1 performs this microtubule controlling function by binding microtubules together like glue. Their description of how TANGLED1 operates was published in the Journal of Cell Biology. New interdisciplinary research published in the Journal of Cell Biology from Associate Professor and plant cell biologist Carolyn Rasmussen’s group describes how...
UC Riverside plant biologist, Hailing Jin, and her team are featured in an “Outlook” piece just published in Nature. The story focuses on how her group is developing sprays consisting of extracellular vesicles containing RNA to silence genes in fungal pathogens of crops. Jin says "that although some scientists are continuing to genetically modify vegetables...
Congratulations! The University of California, University of Florida’s Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, Texas A&M University, California State University, and the USDA – Agricultural Research Service’s National Clonal Germplasm Repository ‐ Tree Fruit & Nut Crops & Grapes, funded to develop strategies to increase marketable yield of pomegranate in California and Florida. Amount Awarded...
Congratulations Isgouhi Kaloshian Professor and Chair of Nematology Elected to the 2019 Class of AAAS Fellows Please join the IIGB and CEPCEB community in congratulating Professor Kaloshian, elected as an American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) member to the 2019 Class of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows. This award recognizes...
Congratulations Shou-Wei Ding Professor, Molecular Virology and Immunology Noel Keen Award Recipient Please join the IIGB and CEPCEB community in congratulating Professor Shou-Wei Ding, the awardee of the 2020 Noel Keen award! This is the most prestigious award from the American Phytopathological Society (APS) for contributions to Molecular Plant Pathology, and the first time that...
Peter Atkinson and Linda Walling have received funding from DARPA to develop gene editing technology in whitefly for the benefit of agriculture. This two year grant will build on work from initially obtained seed money from the UCR Senate and RED. Drs. Atkinson and Walling’s project also benefited from the assistance of several very talented...
IIGB/CEPCEB saw unprecedented participation at the ASPB’s Plant Biology 2019 Conference in San Jose, California. CEPCEB’s own Wenbo Ma was a major symposia organizer of this year’s conference and delivered two talks, “Plant Disease and Resistance Mechanisms Major Symposium Overview by Organizer” and “Trans-kingdom RNAi executed by Secondary Small RNAs confers disease resistance” Other faculty...
Congratulations to former IIGB and CEPCEB Director Natasha Raikhel who was appointed honorary doctor at SLU’s Faculty of Forest Sciences. Find the full press release here.
CEPCEB awarded two Senior Division prizes at the California State Science and Engineering Fair Awards on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. These awards recognize scientific achievement in the fields of cell and molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics or technology development that will impact our understanding of plant cell biology. Special congratulations to David He of San Diego...
An international research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology has found that malaria parasite genomes are shaped by parasite-specific gene families, and that this genome organization strongly correlates with the parasite’s virulence. Study results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
