Recognizing Plant Physiology authors: Yechun Hong

Yechun Hong, co-first author of Two Chloroplast Proteins Negatively Regulate Plant Drought Resistance Through Separate Pathways

Current position: Ph.D. student, Shanghai center for plant stress biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Education: B.S., School of life science, Sun Yat-Sen University

Non-scientific Interests: Basketball

Brief bio: I am interested in how plants cope with abiotic stress during their sessile life, such as drought stress, the most frequent environmental stress condition with enormous crops production losses in agriculture. We screened a specific pool of mutants with T-DNA insertions in nuclear genes encoding chloroplast proteins and identified ppd5-2, a drought-resistant mutant whose phenotype can be rescued by OST1 mutagenesis. Further study showed that PPD5 interacts with and phosphorylated by OST1, which is important for PPD5 protein stability instead of subcellular localization. Together with analysis of genetic interaction between THF1 and OST1, we proposed a model that chloroplast proteins negatively regulate plant drought resistance through both OST1-denpendent and independent pathway.