Pan Gong: Plant Physiology First Author

Pan Gong, first author of “SAMBA controls cell division rate during maize development”

Current Position: No

Education: Ph.D., VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Belgium; MS, Zhejiang University, China

Non-scientific Interests: Swimming, Yoga, Traveling

Brief bio: I joined the Yield group at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Dirk Inzé and Dr. Hilde Nelissen and graduated in 2021. My Ph.D. thesis focuses on deciphering the maize organ growth regulators (SAMBA, DA1 and BRASSINOSTEROID-INSENSITIVE2 (BIN2)) based on knowledge from Arabidopsis. We found that many challenges such as differences in biological processes, gene expression patterns, and genetic backgrounds between maize and Arabidopsis may hamper translational research. In this thesis, we used CRISPR/Cas9 to generate maize mutants and found that designing gRNAs and interpreting the effects of genome-edited mutations at the DNA level should be done with caution, because translation re-initiated can lead to truncated, functional proteins.

姓名：龚盼

目前职位：求职中

教育背景：根特大学，生物化学与生物技术博士；浙江大学，农学硕士

兴趣爱好：喜欢游泳、瑜伽和旅行

科研经历简介：

我博士就读于比利时根特大学VIB-PSB研究中心，并于2021年10月毕业。在Dirk Inzé教授和Hilde Nelissen博士的指导下，我博士期间主要研究调控玉米生长发育相关基因的功能包括SAMBA，DA1和BRASSINOSTEROID-INSENSITIVE2 (BIN2)等。在拟南芥中，敲除或干扰这些基因的表达，可促进植物生长。然而，玉米和拟南芥在生长发育过程、基因表达模式和遗传背景等方面的差异可能会阻碍拟南芥中的研究成果在玉米中的应用。此外，我们运用CRISPR/Cas9成功地编辑了相关玉米基因，并发现不能仅在DNA水平上解释基因编辑突变体的表型，因为，在蛋白水平上，翻译的重新启动可能会产生有功能截断蛋白。