Recognizing Plant Cell first authors: Lin Zhang

Lin Zhang, first author of Nucleus-encoded Protein BFA1 Promotes Efficient Assembly of the Chloroplast ATP Synthase Coupling Factor 1

Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.

Education: PhD in Developmental Biology at the Key Laboratory of Photobiology, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Non-scientific Interests: Reading, swimming, badminton, hiking.

Brief bio: I received my doctoral degree in the laboratory of Prof. Lianwei Peng at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. During my doctoral studies, my research was focused on the assembly process of chloroplast ATP synthase, a key enzyme in energy conversion during photosynthesis which produces ATP from ADP. Now I work at Shanghai Normal University and continue my research on the assembly of ATP synthase. I previously identified BFA3 which acts as an assembly chaperone that transiently interacts specifically with unassembled CF₁β subunit to promote the subsequent association with CF₁a during the early steps of assembly of ATP synthase. This work gave rise to a publication in the journal Plant Physiology (Zhang et al., 2016, Plant Physiol.). I recently isolated additional ATP synthase mutants from Arabidopsis thaliana in order to identify new assembly factors. Characterization of these mutants will provide new insights into the detailed assembly process of ATP synthase.