BMB Weekly #38: September 26, 2025

 

BMB Shares Science at Annual Symposium   This year's BMB symposium at the MSU Union was a great success, offering a day filled with talks, posters, and colleague connections. Thank you to all who attended, and those who made the gathering possible with your organizing!

 

 

Dan Kearns from Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Biology will be presenting "The regulation of swarming motility and flagellar number in Bacillus subtilis".

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

The Fall BMB Seminar Series will run through December 4, 2025. The complete schedule is available on the BMB Fall 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.

 

Please join us for the MPS 2025 Outstanding Paper Award & Community Outreach Award. The recipients are Xiaotong Jiang and Febri Susanto. The title of Xiaotong’s seminar is “A cytosolic glyoxylate shunt complements the canonical photorespiratory pathway in Arabidopsis”. The title of Febri’s seminar is “Cyanoglobules are a stress-responsive metabolic compartment of cyanobacteria and progenitor of plant plastoglobules”. The seminars are being offered both in person & via Zoom.

Attend this seminar on Zoom. Passcode: 028299

Many academic positions require a teaching philosophy statement as one of the application materials to learn about a candidate’s teaching beliefs, values, and use of evidence-based teaching and assessment practices for effective instruction. In this workshop you will learn how to document your teaching and/or teaching professional development experiences to start crafting your teaching philosophy statement with the help of a rubric. At the end of this session, you will have a working draft of your teaching statement, which will encourage you to continue your efforts toward intentional and effective teaching and instruction. Learn more and register here.

Are you having a hard time getting things off your to do list? Would you benefit from a dedicated space and being around others to find motivation and productivity? If so, please join us in a structured community space for supporting goal achievement. We will start at 2pm with a brief time of connecting and sharing goals. We will then have two sessions of about 50-60 minutes where everyone will work on their individual goals with a 10-minute break in between. Learn more here.

This year’s conference will be a half-day packed full of topics that focus on disability inclusion and belonging, lived experience, and accessible practices. This half-day event will feature keynote speaker, disability advocate, and author Haben Girma, networking opportunities, and more. In addition to this year’s Summit, there will be weekly virtual sessions held on Fridays throughout the month of October to honor MSU Disability Pride Month and keep the conversations going. Learn more and register here.

Would scheduling regular, specific times to write about your outreach or engagement work be helpful? If so, please join us on the first Friday of each month for three hours of dedicated time to advance your scholarship. Past participants have written journal articles, grant proposals, book chapters, theses or dissertations, curricula, pieces for public audiences, and community engagement portfolios. Participants should plan to write for the full three hours. We start the write-in by sharing writing goals for the day and wrap up with accomplishments and next steps. Learn more and register here.

The Office of Graduate Career Development announces three virtual career fairs this October hosted by the Big Ten consortium of 18+ institutions. Fairs are free to attend and designed specifically for MS, PhD, and postdoctoral scholars like you. Wherever you are in your academic training or postdoctoral work, now is the perfect time to begin shaping your next professional step. Registration is handled via Handshake, MSU's Career platform!

• BIG10 Academia Postdoc Hiring Fair 
  Tuesday, October 21 | 12:00 – 3:00 PM ET
  Registration Deadline: September 29, 2025
  Open to: PhD students and Postdocs only
   
• BIG10 Academia Faculty Hiring Fair
  Wednesday, October 22 | 12:00 – 4:00 PM ET
  Registration Deadline: September 29, 2025
  Open to: PhD students and Postdocs only
   
• BIG10 Graduate Student & Postdoc Industry Recruitment Event (GSPIRE)
  Thursday, October 23 | 12:00 – 4:00 PM ET
  Registration Deadline: October 13, 2025
  Open to: MS, PhD, and Postdoc students from all disciplines

Check out more great resources on the Graduate Career Development website.

 

The MSU Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) is seeking trainee-led proposals for collaborative projects exploring novel ideas in plant resilience research, broadly defined. The proposed research must not already be funded by an existing grant or part of a current research program. We encourage proposals to be synergistic across MSU laboratories and focus on projects that are both high-risk and high-reward.

Any MSU graduate student or postdoctoral researcher is eligible to submit a proposal, and proposals with graduate student lead PIs will be evaluated separately than those with postdoctoral lead PIs. However, at least one Co-PI must be a member of a PRI lab. Faculty members are not permitted to serve as PIs or Co-PIs, and individuals may participate as PI or Co-PI on only one proposal.

For more information, including proposal preparation and submission instructions, visit this link. Learn more and apply here.

Expenditure will be used to provide fellowship support for students enrolled in graduate programs at MSU. All graduate students including Master’s, Professional and Doctoral students will be eligible, with preference given to students pursing an advanced degree offered in the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations or Community Sustainability. Learn more and apply here.

 

The CIRTL (Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning) Network, of which MSU is a member, is offering numerous asynchronous courses related to various topics associated with professional development in teaching and learning for graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff. View the course list here.

Community Volunteers for International Programs (CVIP) is a volunteer organization within OISS that provides outreach, programs and support to MSU international students and scholars. Learn more here.

Counseling Services offers a variety of counseling, support, and educational groups each semester. Participants benefit from the mutual support and learning that occurs from interaction with others who have similar concerns. Unless otherwise noted, all groups will require a pre-group meeting. For more information, or to schedule your pre-group consultation, please schedule an appointment and state your interest in group counseling on the form.

Groups include:

• Graduate Student Support Group
• RA Support Group
• International Student Support Space
• & More

Learn more here.

You can find the latest department news over on LinkedIn and BlueSky. Give us a follow and be sure to tag us with research updates, publications, and lab updates to help spread the word!

The MSU Student Food Bank is a resource available to students and scholars who may be experiencing food insecurity. The Food Bank provides free food and other essential items to those in need within our MSU community. Learn more here.

 

The Hsu laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is looking for a laboratory technician to assist with ongoing experiments led by the PI and other research personnel to investigate gene expression regulation in plants.
The candidate's main duties will include taking care of transgenic plants and performing gene expression analysis following established protocols, such as qRT-PCR and luciferase assays.

The candidate will also be responsible for maintaining, calibrating and operating equipment such as lab dishwasher, plant growth chamber, dissection microscope, light microscope, PCR machines, centrifuges, autoclave machine. The candidate will also assist in ordering lab supplies, general lab organization, and maintaining lab stocks. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting here.

Michigan State University's Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) is seeking a highly motivated and skilled postdoctoral researcher to lead a project focused on discovering a new class of regulatory metabolites and their nuclear signaling mechanisms that govern plant resilience. The project integrates bioinformatics, molecular genetics, protein structural prediction, and experimental validation to investigate their roles in gene regulation and stress response. The postdoctoral researcher will lean efforts in gene characterization, reverse genetics and ligand screening using phenotyping and molecular genetic approaches. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to conceptual advances in plant stress hormone biology, while building tools and resources of broad utility to the plant science community. The successful candidate will join a highly interdisciplinary team led by Dr. Gregg Howe, with collaborators across PRI. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting here.

The Fitzsimmons lab in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is seeking a postdoctoral research associate for projects focused on the intersection of RNA biology and metabolism. The lab’s research directions include: 1) investigating molecular-level metabolic factors driving RNA modification changes; 2) understanding the regulation of RNA writers and erasers by metabolism; and 3) the role of tumor heterogeneity in RNA gene regulation. The lab employs multidisciplinary approaches from chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, and bioinformatics to investigate the role of RNA modifications and modification enzymes both in vitro and in vivo. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting here.

 

 

Koper, K., de Oliveira, M. V. V., Huß, S., Hataya, S., Soleymani, F., Hawkins, C., Rhee, S. Y., Takasuka, T. E., Nikoloski, Z., & Maeda, H. A. (2025). Mapping multi-substrate specificity of Arabidopsis aminotransferases. Nature plants, 10.1038/s41477-025-02095-6. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-025-02095-6

Cottrell, S., & Wei, G. W. (2025). Multiscale Cell-Cell Interactive Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis. Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany), e08358. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202508358

Sagresti, L., Benedetti, L., Merz, K. M., Jr, & Brancato, G. (2025). Simulating Metal Complex Formation and Ligand Exchange: Unraveling the Interplay between Entropy, Kinetics, and Mechanisms on the Chelate Effect. Journal of chemical theory and computation, 10.1021/acs.jctc.5c01079. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.5c01079

Ford, K. C., Miller, S. D., Tefft, N. M., & TerAvest, M. A. (2025). Overlap and Differences Between the Inward and Outward Electron Transfer Pathways in Shewanella oneidensis. FEMS microbiology letters, fnaf094. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnaf094

Barkarar, M., Sarkar, D., Hunt, C. G., & Vermaas, J. V. (2025). Quantifying Chemically Modified Acetylation Induced Changes in the Plant Secondary Cell Wall Structure and Dynamics. Biomacromolecules, 26(9), 5645–5656. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.biomac.5c00391

 

 

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College of Natural Science | BMB Weekly | Vol. 58, No.38