BMB Weekly #47: November 28, 2025

 

BMB Spotlight: Chinedum Udekwu

Chinedum Udekwu is a familiar face in the halls of BMB, conducting cutting-edge cancer research in lab of department chair Olorunseun Ogunwobi. This year, you'll also find him representing the biochemistry community at MSU's Council of Graduate Students.
Read the full article here.

 

 

 

Ruey-Hwa Chen from the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan will be presenting the lecture titled "Purinosome: assembly mechanisms and biological functions".

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.

 

During our Season of GRADitude, MSU faculty, staff, and students are invited to share a story about an MSU graduate student and why they are grateful for them. The MSU community is invited to vote for their favorite story, as the top five stories with the most votes will be celebrated, and both the nominator and the student will receive a $50 prize. Nominate a student here.

Join us for this special finals edition of the Get Stuff Done series. Come get things off your to do list with the motivation of being around other productive (-looking) people and a sugary energy boost in form of cookies. Some hot beverages will be available too. Learn more here.

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. Learn more 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.

This highly regarded two-day webinar is designed for those who have some experience with grant writing. Participants will receive a copy of The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook, which has been written to complement and extend the webinar. The presenter is John D. Robertson, managing member of the Grant Writers’ Seminars & Workshops, LLC. The cost to attend is $95 and includes a copy of your agency-specific workbook. The Graduate School and COGS will pay $75 of the $95 fee for a limited number of doctoral students to attend. This seminar is appropriate for doctoral students who have had some exposure to writing grant applications, either through training, mentoring, or personal experience. Learn more here.

 

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Michigan State University is excited to announce the launch of its Graduate Student Affiliate Program. This new initiative is designed to support early-career scholars who are eager to deepen their engagement with interdisciplinarity, connect with a community of peers, and strengthen their professional development. Learn more and apply here.

The Graduate Employees Union and Michigan State University agreed to add 500 additional tuition credits to the tuition waiver benefit for teaching assistants. This additional benefit will be in place for 2024-2028. The Spring tuition pool is available to students appointed as teaching assistants in Spring 2026. Learn more and apply here.

The MSU Bouchet Society chapter seeks to develop and cultivate a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, foster environments of support, and serve as examples of scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in the academy. Learn more and apply here.

Nominations are being accepted for the 2026 MAGS Excellence in Teaching Award competition. This Teaching Award is very competitive, so we are looking for exceptional Ph.D. and Master’s students with great demonstration of teaching competence and knowledge of pedagogy, innovative teaching/instructional design, effective mentoring skills, and commitment to teaching professional development. Learn more about criteria and the nomination process using this link.

 

This virtual workshop explores quarterly estimated tax for fellowship recipients and is applicable to currently enrolled MSU graduate or professional students who are US citizens, permanent residents, and residents for tax purposes who are not having federal income tax withheld from their paychecks. This is a largely asynchronous workshop. Upon registering, you will receive your login information over email. After logging in to the workshop, you can immediately access the modules (videos with transcripts) and spreadsheet. You also have the ability to receive answers to your questions by attending a live Q&A call or submitting a question in writing. A discounted cost of $5 is open to currently enrolled MSU Graduate or Professional Students. Registration is first-come, first-served, until all spots are filled. You may be given other options to enroll if the discount program fills up. Learn more and register here. 

Are you graduating soon with your master’s or PhD, and starting (or in the middle of) your job search? Are you feeling a little lost about how best to move ahead? Join a Job Club from the Office of Graduate Career Development at the MSU Graduate School! Learn more and register 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 Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) invites applicants for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant level in horticulture. We seek researchers who use genomic, biotechnological, and/or physiological approaches to address important topics in horticulture. The anticipated start date for this position is July 1, 2026. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research connects fundamental discovery with practical advances in horticulture.

Research that improves productivity, stress tolerance, post-harvest physiology, reproductive physiology, and environmental and economic sustainability is especially encouraged. Complementary areas of interest include: development of new cultivars, applications of genomics to trait discovery and approaches to link genotype with phenotype, gene editing or synthetic biology to accelerate cultivar development and neodomestication, urban landscape revitalization, regenerative agriculture, controlled environment agriculture, and precision/digital horticulture, among others. Learn more and apply 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.

 

 

Cho, H., Choi, I., Bouain, N., Nawaz, A., Zheng, L., Shahzad, Z., Brandizzi, F., Rhee, S. Y., & Rouached, H. (2025). Phosphorus availability controls flowering time through subcellular reprogramming of bGLU25 and GRP7 in Arabidopsis. Developmental cell, S1534-5807(25)00635-5. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2025.10.005

Fan, Y., Noble, D. W. A., Medlyn, B. E., Monson, R. K., Sage, R. F., Smith, N. G., Ainsworth, E. A., Busch, F. A., Danila, F. R., Ermakova, M., Friesen, P., Furbank, R. T., Gan, S. H., Ghannoum, O., Griffith, D. M., Gu, L., Jacob, V., Knauer, J., Leakey, A. D. B., Li, S., … Way, D. A. (2025). Environmental factors have a greater influence on photosynthetic capacity in C4 plants than biochemical subtypes or growth forms. The New phytologist, 248(3), 1205–1224. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70525

Jeon, H. M., Eun, J., Kim, K. H., & Kim, Y. (2025). Cryo-EM structures of human OAT1 reveal drug binding and inhibition mechanisms. Structure (London, England : 1993), 33(11), 1856–1866.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.str.2025.07.019

Keng, M., & Merz, K. M., Jr (2025). PEAS: An Application for Autonomous Precision Conformation Sampling. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02104. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02104

Kokarakis, E. J., Santos-Merino, M., Ghaffarinasab, S., Vocelle, D., & Ducat, D. C. (2025). Engineering quorum-sensing circuits in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 towards self-inducible systems. Metabolic engineering, 92, 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2025.07.008

Prado, K., Xue, B., Johnson, J. E., Field, S., Stata, M., Hawkins, C. L., Hsia, R. C., Liu, H., Cheng, S., & Rhee, S. Y. (2025). Photosynthetic acclimation is a key contributor to exponential growth of a desert plant in Death Valley summer. Current biology : CB, S0960-9822(25)01312-0. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.10.004

Ying S. (2025). Get the ball rolling: update and perspective on the role of chloroplast plastoglobule-associated proteins under abiotic stress. Journal of experimental botany, 76(17), 4735–4744. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraf011

Zuo, Z., Weraduwage, S. M., Huang, T., & Sharkey, T. D. (2025). How volatile isoprenoids improve plant thermotolerance. Trends in plant science, 30(11), 1237–1250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2025.05.004

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