BMB Weekly #15: April 12, 2024

 

Erich Grotewold receives 2023-2024 William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award   "GLBRC researchers at UW, MSU unravel microbial mysteries in quest for better biofuels" Read the full article here.

 

 

Piro Lito from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center will be presenting "Targeting oncogenic RAS: implications for cancer biology and therapy".

To join us on Zoom, click this link. Password: bmbseminar

The Spring BMB Seminar Series will run through April 18, 2024. The complete schedule is available on the BMB Spring Seminar Series website. If you are interested in meeting with any of these speakers please email Leslie Williams, glady@msu.edu. Many speakers are planning to visit in-person. A zoom option will continue to be offered for all seminars.

 

 

Join us for MPS speaker Robert Last from Michigan State University. The seminar will be held at 4:00 p.m. in BCH room 101.

Robert’s talk is titled “Secondary or Specialized? Natural variation informs our understanding of plant metabolism”. We would like to invite graduate students and postdocs to join the speaker for a lunch and discussion. Lunch will be provided at 12:00 p.m. in PLB 168. This is a great opportunity to meet our outside speaker in an informal environment. If you would like to participate in the luncheon, please RSVP to Keri Morris (morrisk@msu.edu) with any dietary restrictions by Friday, April 12, 2024 at noon. All students and post docs who are interested in this week’s seminar topic are welcome to attend. You do not need to be in the MPS program or affiliated with an MPS faculty member.

In this 60-minute seminar, you will learn about the basics of Stata and how to best use Stata in the data analysis process. In particular, we will walk through a simple project to demonstrate the typical workflow in Stata as well as how to use Stata’s command syntax to achieve the following tasks:

1. Importing data
2. Cleaning data and doing basic data/variable transformation
3. Exploring data with basic visualization and descriptive statistics
4. Running statistical tests and fitting models
5. Reporting results and saving data

Along the way, we will also discuss tips and tricks to manage your research project effectively and ensure reproducibility when using Stata. Learn more and register here.

The PRL Tuesday Noon Seminar on April 16, 2024 will feature a talk from Xiaotong Jiang from Hu Lab. The seminar is titled “Arabidopsis Glyoxylate Reductase 1 is involved in a non-canonical photorespiratory pathway under high light conditions”.

Please join us at 12pm in PLB 168 or by Zoom with this link. Passcode: 420205

Each semester has a deadline for the initial submission of theses and dissertations to ProQuest. The deadline is generally two weeks prior to the final deadline. Plan your defense accordingly. The document submitted to ProQuest is expected to be a final version, meaning it has been successfully defended, corrections the committee wants have been made, and there are no more content changes. Students are highly encouraged to read and follow the Thesis and Dissertation information available on the Graduate School’s website at: https://grad.msu.edu/etd. This site gives instructions on formatting, required paperwork, and how to submit to ProQuest.

The Graduate School cordially invites you to join the Teaching Cohort Fellowship Showcase where Graduate School sponsored fellows share the projects they have worked on throughout the academic year. Showcases will take place in Room 110, 220, and the Chittenden Commons. This event is open to all. Learn more and register here.

The Plant Resilience Institute's first International Plant Resilience Summit will convene an international cohort of world-class plant science researchers at Michigan State University from May 16-17, 2024. A detailed schedule is available online. The event is FREE and open to all MSU community members. Please register using the online form. Registration closes on Monday, April 15, 2024, at 5 pm ET. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Gaëlle Cassin-Ross (cassin@msu.edu).

 

This endowed award program seeks to advance the work of an MSU graduate student whose research has the potential to contribute to economic and scientific improvements in society, with a promise of practical applications that benefit U.S. economic interests. Applicants must be graduate students in good standing who have successfully passed their preliminary exam, have a track record of research accomplishment, and a project that is ripe for translation to impact through a commercialization/dissemination pathway. Learn more and apply here.

The Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program provides supplemental awards to outstanding U.S. graduate students to conduct part of their graduate thesis research at a DOE national laboratory or facility in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist. The goal of the program is to prepare graduate students for scientific and technical careers critically important to the mission of DOE’s Office of Science. The research opportunity is expected to advance the graduate students’ overall graduate theses while providing access to the expertise, resources, and capabilities available at the host DOE laboratories. Learn more and apply here.

Application Deadline:

• Outstanding Doctoral Student Mentor Award: April 15, 2024
• Outstanding Graduate Program Community Award: May 15, 2024
• Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award: May 15, 2024

Nominations for this year’s Graduate School Outstanding Mentoring Awards are now open. These awards recognize graduate programs, faculty, and doctoral students who exemplify mentoring best practices. Learn more about the various awards and how to nominate a person or program by following this link.

 

This Personal Finance for PhDs workshop is provided to you for free by the Graduate School Office of Well-Being, Council of Graduate Students, and the Graduate School at Michigan State University. This workshop teaches you the federal higher education tax benefits available to you, including how to tabulate, calculate, and report your funding and education expenses. Learn more and register here.

The MSU Department of Police and Public Safety has released an online Active Violence Incident Awareness Training program that is available for students, faculty, and staff. This training includes a presentation explaining how to respond during an active violence situation. Throughout the training, knowledge checkpoint questions will appear on screen to evaluate participants’ understanding of the content. In addition, a video is in development, which will be included in the training at a later time. Learn more here.

Eligible to undergraduates, graduates, and professional students enrolled in Fall/Spring semester and without a dining plan. Fruits, soups, pasta, rice, protein, cereal, bread, and fresh produce available year-round! To learn more about visiting the MSU Foodbank, or to donate, visit here.

 

Dr. Xiaosa (Jack) Xu Lab in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of California, Davis is seeking a highly motivated and independent individual who is interested in pursuing an academic career in plant developmental genetics and single-cell genomics research. The postdoctoral scholar who secures this position will use cutting-edge single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, and genome editing approaches to identify and characterize key genes in plant development and evolution, and inform crop improvement. The successful applicant will be responsible for conducting single-cell genomics and spatial transcriptomics experiments and data analysis, followed by genome editing validation. The applicant will work closely with a team in the Xu lab, as well as with collaborators at UC Davis and other institutions. They will have the opportunity to mentor graduate and undergraduate students, participate in the preparation and writing of manuscripts and grants. The candidate will also have opportunities to attend workshops/courses as required by ongoing and future research projects, such as the Frontiers and Techniques in Plant Science course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Contact Dr. Xiaosa (Jack) Xu for further information. Learn more about this listing by following this link.

The College of Osteopathic Medicine is seeking a highly motivated and productive chemical biologist/biochemist to conduct daily research on exciting recently funded projects to 1) investigate how lipid metabolites affect neurodegeneration and 2) discover novel molecules to treat diseases with no effective intervention. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting and apply at this link.

A Postdoctoral Research Associate position is available in the laboratory of Melanie Balbach. The Research Associate will focus on the metabolic changes and underlying regulatory pathways in the male germ cell during activation and during zygote development. The position requires the development and application of advanced omics tools in combination with sperm motility, capacitation and fertilization read-outs as well as high-throughput screening assays. Research findings are expected to be reported in the form of written publications as well as oral presentations within MSU and at scientific meetings. Opportunities for professional development include participation in grant proposal writing, attending and presenting at scientific research symposiums and conferences, networking with other scientists within and outside MSU as well as mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting and apply at this link.

 

Chatterjee, S., Fellner, M., Rankin, J., Thomas, M. G., J S Rifayee, S. B., Christov, C. Z., Hu, J., & Hausinger, R. P. (2024). Structural, Spectroscopic, and Computational Insights from Canavanine-Bound and Two Catalytically Compromised Variants of the Ethylene-Forming Enzyme. Biochemistry, 10.1021/acs.biochem.4c00031. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.biochem.4c00031

Cottrell, S., Wang, R., & Wei, G. W. (2024). PLPCA: Persistent Laplacian-Enhanced PCA for Microarray Data Analysis. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 64(7), 2405–2420. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01023

Hozumi, Y., Tanemura, K. A., & Wei, G. W. (2024). Preprocessing of Single Cell RNA Sequencing Data Using Correlated Clustering and Projection. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 64(7), 2829–2838. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.3c00674

Jin, H., & Merz, K. M., Jr (2024). Modeling Zinc Complexes Using Neural Networks. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00095. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00095

Su, Z., Tong, Y., & Wei, G. W. (2024). Hodge Decomposition of Single-Cell RNA Velocity. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00132. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.4c00132

Weraduwage, S. M., Whitten, D., Kulke, M., Sahu, A., Vermaas, J. V., & Sharkey, T. D. (2024). The isoprene-responsive phosphoproteome provides new insights into the putative signalling pathways and novel roles of isoprene. Plant, cell & environment, 47(4), 1099–1117. https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.14776

Xu, Y., Schmiege, S. C., & Sharkey, T. D. (2024). The oxidative pentose phosphate pathway in photosynthesis: a tale of two shunts. The New phytologist, 10.1111/nph.19730. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19730

 

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College of Natural Science | BMB Weekly | Vol. 57, No.15