Satinder Gidda: The Plant Cell First Author

Satinder Gidda, co-first author of “LDIP Cooperates with SEIPIN and LDAP to Facilitate Lipid Droplet Biogenesis in Arabidopsis”

Education: M.Biotechnology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) (New Delhi, India); Ph.D in Biology at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada)

Non-scientific Interests: cooking, yoga

Brief bio: As a student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, I became fascinated by the array of new molecular biology tools being used to answer previously unexplored questions in biology. Then, when I moved to Montreal, the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome was just being completed and, like others, I saw the immense potential for how this resource could be applied to the understanding of plant biology in general. Supervised by Dr. Luc Varin, my Ph.D at Concordia University in Montreal involved the characterization of two members of the Arabidopsis sulfotransferase enzyme family. My research interests then extended to plant cell and lipid biology when I joined the lab of Dr. Robert Mullen at the University of Guelph as a post-doctoral associate. Initially my work focused on diacylglycerol acyltransferases (DGATs), which are key enzymes involved in the final step in triacylglycerol biosynthesis. We showed that DGAT1 and DGAT2 are localized to discrete “subdomains” of the endoplasmic reticulum. These early findings set the stage for other exciting discoveries that involved collaborations with the labs of Dr. John Dyer (USDA) and Dr. Kent Chapman (University of North Texas) and were aimed at deciphering the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the production of seed oils and their proper packaging into lipid droplets.