After a long journey, we are excited to share our work on Arabidopsis CAD1 - a protein with some homology to mammalian perforin (!), now published in Genetics. And, we are absolutely thrilled that the journal chose to feature CAD1 on the cover of the April 2021 issue!
This project started while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Cyril Zipfel, and was then championed by Danalyn Holmes, who worked in our lab during her second (volunteer), third (research mentorship and summer student), and fourth year (Hons thesis) at Queen's. Danalyn and I worked closely together on this project and share first-authorship, but this was a true team effort over the years - Sydney Pascetta worked on CAD1 genetics for her Hons thesis, genotyping hundreds of plants to identify cad1 eds1 and cad1 ndr1 double mutants. Melissa Bredow discovered that the mutation we identified in the N-terminus of CAD1 resulted in reduced protein accumulation/stability, and also helped us determine that CAD1 localizes to both the cytosol and the plasma membrane. Irina Sementchokova and Kristen Siegel performed many CAD1-related experiments during their MSc projects, and Kathrin Thor helped with some of the crosses. Congrats to all authors. This one was in the works for a long, long time and we are so happy that CAD1 has found her home in Genetics.
We are thrilled to share our article on flg22 diversity that was recently published in Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions. This was a really fun Queen's Biology collaboration between our lab and the diCenzo Lab. The work was spearheaded by two talented NSERC-funded scientists: undergraduate Janis Cheng and postdoc Melissa Bredow, who share co-first authorship on this manuscript. Janis also presented this work at the Canadian Society for Plant Biology's Eastern Regional Meeting in the fall of 2020, earning a Presentation Award. To celebrate these achievements, we met up several weeks ago at Kingston's Market Square for an outdoor hot chocolate.
We are thrilled to share our most recent publication in Plant Physiology, in which we describe the large-scale identification of ubiquitination sites on Arabidopsis proteins associated with or integral to the plasma membrane, including over 100 protein kinases. Congratulations to former MSc student Lauren Grubb, on her very first, first-author publication. During her degree, Lauren was awarded a prestigious NSERC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement to work with proteomics experts Frank Menke, Paul Derbyshire, and Cyril Zipfel at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England. Loving her stay abroad, she later joined the John Innes Centre as a PhD Student. Very recent MSc graduate Katy Dunning used her expert computing skills to analyze the finer details of our dataset, and this is her very first co-authored publication. We hope you find this dataset useful. Congrats to all co-authors on their great work and perseverance during the ongoing pandemic.
Congratulations to Katy Dunning, who masterfully defended her thesis "Investigating ubiquitin-mediated turnover of the key immune signaling protein kinase BOTRYTIS INDUCED KINASE1" before the winter break. You can read more about her work here. To celebrate her achievement, we enjoyed cupcakes and Brut from the comfort of our own homes, via Zoom.
Well done Katy, the lab will not be the same without you!
 MSc student Katherine Dunning has been selected as one of this year's American Society for Plant Biology Plantae Fellows. Below are some of the excellent paper summaries she has published in the Plant Science Research Weekly blog. Her summaries are great - check them out!
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