How many genes control a phenotype? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? The whole genome? And what about the epigenome? Such fascinating questions on biological complexity and the interaction between genes and the environment (or, in the case of infection by a plant pathogen, multiple genomes) have long…

By Alex Harkess and Margaret Frank While working on very small RNA molecules, Blake Meyers tackles some of the biggest problems in plant biology. Blake has spent much of his academic career generating and sifting through billions of sequence reads to ask a deceptively simple question: what do small…

Areas of expertise Chlamydomonas, chloroplast biology, metabolic regulation, transcriptomics, proteomics, micronutrients. ​ Sabeeha Merchant is a Professor of Biochemistry and a member of the Molecular Biology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed BS and PhD degrees…

Areas of expertise Genomics, microRNAs, bioinformatics, epigenetics. Blake Meyers is a member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, and a Professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He completed his BA degree at the University of Chicago and his MS and PhD degrees at the…

Areas of expertise Metabolic regulation, secondary metabolism/natural products, statistical genetics, transcriptome and metabolome analysis, plant–biotic interactions. Dan Kliebenstein is a Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He completed a BS degree at Iowa…

Areas of expertise Phyothormones, cytokinin, ethylene, auxin, cell wall, receptor-like kinases, genetics. Joseph Kieber holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His group uses the model plants Arabidopsis…

Areas of expertise Disease resistance, cell death, plant pathogens. Jean Greenberg is a Professor in the Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology Dept. University of Chicago, Committee on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology, and Committee on Microbiology. Her work examines both sides of the plant-pathogen…