Recognizing Plant Physiology first authors: Wenshuang Li

Wenshuang Li, first author of A Musashi Splice Variant and its Interaction Partners Influence Temperature Acclimation in Chlamydomonas

Current position: PhD candidate of Botany, Matthias Schleiden Institute of Genetics, Bioinformatics and Molecular Botany, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

Education: M.Sc. Molecular Life Sciences, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Bachelor of Engineering in Bioengineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, China.

Non-scientific interests: Movies, music, traveling, swimming and cooking.

Brief bio: My love for life science has made me a scientific researcher in biology. After my undergraduate study in China, I decided to study in Germany to expand my knowledge and strengthen my research skills. During my graduate study (2012-2014) I got the opportunity to work in Prof. Maria Mittag’s lab. At that time I started to learn different approaches to study protein-protein interactions and gene modifications in the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. As a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Maria Mittag since 2014, I have been focusing on functional characterization of interaction partners of XRN1 in C. reinhardtii. Our group is the first to characterize a plant Musashi protein which interacts with XRN1, binds to RNAs and has several splicing variants in C. reinhardtii.