​I was invited by University of Toronto Professor Clare Hasenkampf to do a guest lecture on Thursday last week for her new 400-level course called 'Plant Research and Biotechnology: Addressing Global Problems'. I had a great afternoon talking to students about plant biotechnology and recent innovations in our field. I then spent Friday morning discussing our ongoing research with faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences before giving a seminar in their weekly series. I really enjoyed my visit and was very impressed with the laboratory spaces and plant growth facilities. 

They ran an article about our work in the Queen's Gazette called Flipping the Switch - here's an excerpt: 
​“Most people are familiar with their own immune system and how it functions, but we don’t often consider immune systems in other organisms,” explains Dr. Monaghan, who took part in the study while a postdoctoral researcher at the Sainsbury Laboratory. “Immune responses need to be ‘turned off’ once the threat is eliminated – otherwise, there can be negative effects on the organism. In humans, this can result in autoimmune disorders. In plants, we see stunted growth and other detrimental effects.”

I enjoyed working on this exciting project published today in Science. Congrats to all the authors, especially first-author Martin Stegmann, on this great achievement! The work was done in the labs of Cyril Zipfel and the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich UK and Youssef Belkadir at the GMI in Vienna, Austria. 
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Here's a summary of what we found:
To grow well, all the plants around you, including the ones on your dinner plate, need to respond to environmental stresses such as pathogen infection, water availability, and temperature fluctuations. In some ways similar to our own immune system, plants are able to respond to pathogen infection through cellular receptors that activate anti-microbial defense. Responding to pathogen stress must be carefully balanced in order to avoid negative impacts to growth. The aim of this work was to understand this balancing act. We uncovered the role of a group of small proteins called RALF peptides that dampen immune signaling by interfering with the assembly of immune receptor complexes. This kind of ‘negative-feedback’ regulation is common in many signaling pathways but is just starting to be understood in plants. 

Today we welcome Heather Galley to the lab, where she will be completing the lab placement component of the Biotechnology-Advanced program from nearby St. Lawrence College. Heather will work on several projects during the next four months, including a lot of cloning, genetic crosses, and protein expression assays. 

We are delighted to have her join the lab, welcome! 

We have a lot to celebrate this month in the Monaghan Lab. First, I was awarded an infrastructure grant to establish a state-of-the-art facility for molecular plant biology and signal transduction. Second, a major paper was accepted from my postdoctoral work describing a new aspect of plant immune regulation. And third, Lauren was awarded an NSERC travel grant to do mass spec work at The Sainsbury Lab this spring. This is a great opportunity for her to expand on the work she's started for her MSc degree looking at post-translational modifications of immune proteins.

Overall, it's been a great first year for us at Queen's. I've been so fortunate to work with a talented group of people who have come together to get the lab up and running. We're off to a great start and I can't wait to see what 2017 has in store.

Here's to a healthy and happy new year! 

This week marks the end of the fall 2016 school term and we have to say some goodbyes. Danielle started in the lab as a summer NSERC USRA recipient and continued as a Research Mentorship student this term. During the last 7 months she has mastered site-directed mutagenesis, cloning by Gibson assembly, purification of recombinant proteins from E.coli, SDS-PAGE, and immunoblotting.  Kathy helped us get organized as a volunteer in the spring, and then came back as a Research Mentorship student this term. During the last 3 months, she has mined thorugh gene expression datasets, analysed several multi-sequence alignments, and cloned genes from early land-plants. Kathy and Danielle have been assets to our budding research program and we will really miss having them as labmates. Best wishes to both of you! 

This weekend the Monaghan Lab attended the Canadian Society for Plant Biology's Eastern Regional Meeting. Lauren, Kristen, and Danalyn presented a poster on transient assays in Nicotiana benthamiana - something they have helped us set up here at Queen's. The meeting was held at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington Ontario. Plenary lectures by  Maheshi Dassanayake, Jean Greenberg, and Daphne Goring were excellent, as were concurrent sessions featuring exceptional research in plant molecular biology and signaling.  We were inspired by the work presented and even made a few new collaborations. Thanks so much to the organizers, including my former undergraduate mentor Robin Cameron, for putting together this great meeting.

​This week we welcomed Alex Johnson Dingee to the lab as a volunteer helper. Alex will assist us with weekly lab chores and run tests to establish the best conditions for a few forward-genetic screens we want to set up.