Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Janina Steinbeck

Janina Steinbeck, first author of In Vivo NADH/NAD+ Biosensing Reveals the Dynamics of Cytosolic Redox Metabolism in Plants

Current position: Postdoc in the Plant Energy Biology Lab, Institute for Biology and Biotechnology of Plants, University of Münster

Education: PhD jointly at the University of Queensland and the University of Münster (2013-2018); B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Biological Sciences, University of Münster (2007-2013)

Non-scientific interests: improvisation theatre, traveling

Brief bio: In my Masters I got interested in hydrogen production by microalgae, and got particularly excited about the regulatory mechanisms of photosynthesis in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Its dysregulation can result in a substantial hydrogen burst under sulfur deprivation. To further explore the regulation of photosynthesis, including its structural re-organization, I continued my research in the lab of Michael Hippler as a PhD student in collaboration with Ben Hankamer from the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Brisbane, Australia. After completing my PhD, I moved on to expand my understanding of the integration of photosynthesis into the plant metabolic network as a Postdoc in Markus Schwarzländer’s lab. I got fascinated about the potential of fluorescent protein biosensing to explore individual cell metabolism with high spatiotemporal resolution and moved from microalgae to Arabidopsis thaliana as complex multicellular organism. NAD acts as a universal metabolic redox co-factor in central metabolism, but its redox dynamics in planta have been hard to assess directly. The establishment of the fluorescent biosensor Peredox in Arabidopsis provides a new tool to the plant science community to investigate pressing open research questions about the metabolic redox dynamics in whole plants, their organs, tissues, cells and subcellular compartments at depth in the future.