This season we are busting myths, and in this episode, we discuss the myth that mentoring is a one-way street. We talk with our guest Beronda Montgomery, Ph.D., about a cyanobacterium that changes shape in response to stress, and how mentors and trainees also need to change in response to their mutual…

Plants encounter myriad invaders, including bacteria, fungi, insects, and other parasites. These pathogens generally deliver effector proteins into plants, increasing their virulence and targeting various host processes (Toruño et al., 2016). Although advances in the past two decades have led to significant…

Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a potent inhibitor of cytochrome c oxidase, a conserved component of the respiratory electron transport chain in all aerobic life. Thus, HCN is well suited to serve as a broad-spectrum chemical defense, and indeed it plays such a role in many interactions between plants and…

(Translated from the Chinese original) Auxin is an important plant hormone that is essential for plant growth and development. At present, people's understanding of auxin signal transduction mainly focuses on the process of auxin receptor TIR1/AFBs- mediated Aux/IAAs protein degradation…

A series by Alyssa Preiser Why did you decide to pursue science as you went through college, and what got you particularly interested in plant defense and plant/organism interactions? I was always interested in science. It started as a young kid when I used to collect natural history - animal skulls,…

Informational Interview by Yen Ning Chai, ASPB Conviron Scholar 2018 Dr. Chia Sin Liew is a bioinformatician working for the bioinformatics core facility at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Her jobs include maintaining the computing servers and providing bioinformatics services to the researchers…

Informational Interview by Jaclyn Noshay, ASPB Conviron Scholar 2018 Dr. Amanda Waters is currently a Crop Bioinformatician in the Agro-Discovery team of PepsiCo.  After beginning her undergraduate degree as a pre-med biology student, she began to do research in Dr. Nathan Springer’s maize genomics…

Informational Interview by Tatyana Soto, ASPB Conviron Scholar 2020 Hope you enjoy my interview with Dr. Lisa Urry. I made it into a graphic just to make it more animated and engaging but this meant I had to condense some information. If you want to hear the inspiring story of her parents being first…