Mortar and pestle

Crushing Plants in the Lab

Marissa and China
Carine Marshall (Left) and Frank Harmon (Right)
Flowers

Arabidopsis (Fletcher Lab)

Jana Hassan of the Lewis Lab works with samples
Tester Slide II

PGEC Greenhouse

China Lunde working with a developing corn ear

arabidopsisThe Plant Gene Expression Center (PGEC) conducts fundamental research in plant molecular biology. Researchers are elucidating the signal transduction pathways responsible for the perception of environmental and cellular cues. We are exploring disease resistance, light perception, the circadian clock, vegetative growth and the plant-associated microbiome. Essential genes and the networks within which they operate are elucidated using molecular, genetic and biochemical approaches.

The PGEC is a collaboration of the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Plant & Microbial Biology Department of the University of California, Berkeley. The Center's principal investigators are faculty at UC Berkeley, and research opportunities are available in our laboratories for graduate and undergraduate students.

New Collaborative Paper from the Lewis Lab

Graduate student Ilea Chau-Ly and Jenn Lewis collaborated with Joe Bondy-Denomy's lab at UCSF to apply CRISPR-Cas3 gene editing to delete a cluster of effector genes in Pseudomonas syringae. This method will provide a new tool for functional genomics in P. syringae. The paper has been accepted at Nature Methods. Click Read more to read the Abstract. Posted 09/21/2020.

New Graduate Student joins the Lewis Lab

UC Berkeley graduate student Nathan Diplock has joined the Lewis Lab for his dissertation research. He will work on immune pathways regulated by ZAR1. Posted 09/21/2020.

Fletcher Lab News

Congratulations to Dr. Thai Q “Dat” Dao, who received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher lab in July 2020 and started a postdoc with Sam Leiboff (a former postdoc in the Hake Lab, now an Assistant Professor) at Oregon State University. And welcome to PMB student Lynne Hagelthorn, who is doing her first rotation in the Fletcher Lab. Posted 09/16/2020

New Paper from George Chuck's Group

Necrotic upper tips1 mimics heat and drought stress and encodes a protoxylem-specific transcription factor in maize, by Zhaobin Dong, Zhennan Xu, Ling Xu, Mary Galli,Andrea Gallavotti, Hugo K. Dooner, and George Chuck PNAS August 25, 2020 117 (34) 20908-20919; first published August 10, 2020. Click Read more for a link to the paper, and to read the Significance Statement and Abstract. Posted 09/15/2020.

Congratulations to Drs. Haining, Simmons, and Wipf!

Brianna Haining from the Hake Lab, and Tuesday Simmons and Edi Wipf from the Coleman-Derr Lab, all completed their Ph.D. degrees in August 2020. Tuesday has taken a position at a start-up firm, General Automation Lab Technology, in San Carlos, CA. Posted 09/15/2020.

New Grant for the Coleman-Derr Lab

The lab will participate in a new DOE-funded, 3 year Scientific Focus Area Project led by Dr. Robert Egbert of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to engineer persistence and control into microbial amendment products for agriculture. Click Read more for details about their role in the grant. Click Read more for details about their role in this project. Posted 09/15/2020.

New Paper from the Coleman-Derr Lab

Simmons T. , Styer, A. b., Pierroz, G., Goncalves, A.P., Pasricha, R., Hazra, A.B., Bubner, P. and Coleman-Derr, D. Drought Drives Spatial Variation in the Millet Root Microbiome, Front. Plant Sci., 28 May 2020. The paper explores where shifts in microbiome composition are driven by local or global effects, and compiles results from several other studies for a broad comparison of drought-enriched taxa from different environments and hosts. Click Read more for a link to the paper and to read the Abstract. Posted 09/15/2020.

New Members of the Coleman-Derr Lab

Welcome to UC-B's Plant Biology graduate student Bradie Lee, who will be co-advised by John Vogel at the Joint Genome Institute, and to a new postdoctoral researcher, Nathan Hicks, a recent graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health. Click Read more to find out about their planned research. Posted 09/15/2020.

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