BMB Weekly #48: December 5, 2025

 

BMB Congratulates 2025 Undergraduate Awardees

BMB Outstanding Undergraduate:
Nu Thuy Anh Le
Mentor: Dr. Kelly Kim

Professor Richard L. Anderson Endowed Undergraduate Research Prize:
Olivia White
Mentor: Eric Hegg

Dr. James K. Billman, Jr. Undergraduate Research Award:
Gloria Chou
Mentor: James Geiger

Kate Darrow
Mentor: Tommy Vo

Sooahn Jang
Mentor: Thomas O Halloran

Michael Burdick BMB Scholarship:
Kallun Cope

Carmela Ifraimov

Bianca Miller

Pamela J. Fraker Undergraduate Scholarship:
Barman Nasirpour

Moore-Billman Scholarship in BMB:
Benjamin Nketsiah
Mentor: Kyle Miller

BMB Undergraduate Research Fellowship:
Paige Franklin
Mentor: Michelle Hulin

Chloe Pluger
Mentor: Carolina de Aguiar Ferreira

Godfred Osei-Agye
Mentor: Ben Orlando

Rahgan Swaffer
Mentor: Jitao Zhang

Visit the awards page here.

 

 

 

 

 

This upcoming Monday’s Seminar is the Hans Kende Memorial Award Seminar. The recipient of this year’s award is Joshua Kaste, who worked in Dr. Yair Shachar-Hill’s lab. The title of his seminar is “Modeling of Zea mays quantifies the costs, benefits, and synergies of bioengineering symbioses with rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi”. The seminar is being offered both in person & via Zoom.

Attend this seminar via Zoom. Passcode: 028299                      

At the heart of what you do as a scholar is to produce data and or other creative products. The gathering, use of and ownership of data and creative products are critical to understand. This session will discuss the diversity of what data can be, and who controls, owns and can share such data. We will also discuss practical means to protect your data and creative products. Learn more and register here.

If you have attended the CCTI or any of our workshops for preparing a Teaching Statement, or Research Statement, this Scaffolding session is for you! Please join us to keep the momentum going and make progress on your materials. Please come to this working and scaffolding session prepared with questions, identify your needs, and set goals to complete your work. Learn more and register here.

The MSU Plant Science Community is invited to stop by the Herbarium December 11th between 9–11 a.m. for light refreshments and a showcase of specimen displays. Don’t forget to wear your favorite holiday sweater to help spread some cheer!

The Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) hosts a bimonthly event series, PRI Networking Hour, on the second and fourth Thursday of the month during the fall and spring semesters. These hybrid workshops are open to all at MSU and focus on fostering engaging discussions on essential topics, such as responsible conduct of research, career development, writing skills, and more. Learn more here.

This annual series helps strengthen international collaboration between PRI and the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) by increasing mutual awareness of ongoing research efforts. Each Zoom webinar features one speaker from PRI and one from CSRS.

PRI Speaker: Emily Josephs, "Integrating Evolution and Genomics to Understand Plant Resilience in the Wild"
CSRS Speaker: Akihiro Ezoe, "Functional Diversification in Duplicate Genes Determined by Scale of Duplication Mechanisms"

Learn more 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.

 

MSU IT Educational Technology is excited to offer a variety of end of semester resources this December. Participate in Certification Pathways and watch 5-minute videos on end of the semester and accessibility tips. Learn more here.

In grief, we may not feel like ourselves. We may struggle to make meaning out of loss. No Spartan needs to face grief alone. Find healing and growth within our community through support sessions led by licensed grief counselors. These free, drop-in Grief and Loss Support Sessions meet weekly on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. via Zoom. 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.

 

 

Keng, M., & Merz, K. M., Jr (2025). PEAS: An Application for Autonomous Precision Conformation Sampling. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 65(22), 12161–12167. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02104

Shammami, M. A., Virola-Iarussi, A., McCrary, I., & Ralston, A. (2025). Primitive means first, not worst: Critical roles for primitive endoderm in embryos and embryo models. Developmental biology, 528, 255–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2025.09.008

Luo, C., Zheng, D., Elnegiry, A., Bhatara, S., Mias, G. I., Tsoi, M. F., Yu, J., & Gu, B. (2025). SOX2 is a dispensable modulator of NUT carcinoma oncogenesis in mice. Life science alliance, 9(2), e202503447. https://doi.org/10.26508/lsa.202503447

Jiang, J., Li, D., Wang, G., & Wei, G. W. (2025). Recent advances in machine learning predictions of protein-ligand binding affinities. Current opinion in structural biology, 96, 103193. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbi.2025.103193

Subramanian, S., Dover, J. A., & Parent, K. N. (2025). The Shigella siphophage Sf11 tail structure and host attachment mechanism. Journal of virology, e0136725. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.01367-25

Yang, F., Dee, E. C., Singh, A., Wu, Y., Suggitt, J. O., Treechairusame, T., Silverio Polanco, E., Honawar, A., Zhang, Z., Mah, D., Sine, K., Shim, A., Lin, H., Kang, J. J., Tsai, C. J., McBride, S. M., Riaz, N., Gelblum, D. Y., Zakeri, K., Chen, L., … Lee, N. Y. (2025). Osteoradionecrosis After Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy or Proton Therapy in Oropharyngeal Carcinoma. JAMA otolaryngology-- head & neck surgery, e254179. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoto.2025.4179

Gatreddi, S., Subramanian, S., Sui, D., Wang, T., Urdiain-Arraiza, J., Desguin, B., Hausinger, R. P., Parent, K. N., & Hu, J. (2025). Structures of two LarA-like nickel-pincer nucleotide cofactor-utilizing enzymes with a single catalytic histidine residue. Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society, 34(12), e70362. https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.70362

Janson, G., Jussupow, A., & Feig, M. (2025). Deep generative modeling of temperature-dependent structural ensembles of proteins. Communications chemistry, 8(1), 354. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-025-01737-2

Herrera-Tequia, A., Shivaiah, K. K., & Lundquist, P. K. (2025). Arabidopsis thalianaFibrillin 3a binds saturated fatty acids of chloroplast membranes. Plant signaling & behavior, 20(1), 2594894. https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2025.2594894

Xu, X., Wang, C., Wei, G. W., & Chen, J. (2025). PLNet: Persistent Laplacian neural network for protein-protein binding free energy prediction. Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society, 34(12), e70377. https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.70377

Mandal, S., Soriano, A., Erpelding, C., Ruffner, J., Smith, E., Orlando, B. J., & Kroos, L. (2025). Inhibitory proteins of Bacillus subtilis interact within the membrane to block intramembrane protease activity. Journal of bacteriology, 207(11), e0018625. https://doi.org/10.1128/jb.00186-25

O'Malley, A., Offermann, L. R., Khatri, K., Linn, C., Pote, S., McBride, J. K., Perdue, M. L., Hurlburt, B. K., Maleki, S. J., Mias, G. I., & Chruszcz, M. (2025). Structural analysis of 8-anilino-1-naphthalene sulfonate (ANS) binding to the PR-10 allergen Ara h 8. Biochemical and biophysical research communications, 793, 153013. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbrc.2025.153013

Nirmal, M. B., Pearce, M. E., Liu, C. T., Finkel, J. M., Darrow, K. S., & Vo, T. V. (2025). Deletion of Elongator Protein 1 (Elp1) relieves heterochromatin defects in a Pol II mutant of Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Genetics, iyaf258. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyaf258

Dean, A. E., Guzior, D. V., Quinn, R. A., Gaulke, C. A., & Anakk, S. (2025). Serum cholic acid and cecal Faecalibaculum increase in a male-specific manner in a murine hepatocellular carcinoma model. Journal of lipid research, 100954. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlr.2025.100954

Hoh, D., Osei-Bonsu, I., Kanazawa, A., Fisher, N., Cruz, J., Roberts, P. A., Huynh, B. L., & Kramer, D. M. (2025). From quantitative trait loci towards mechanisms: Linkage Integration Hypothesis Testing (LIgHT) sheds light on the mechanisms of genetically modulated stress tolerance. Journal of experimental botany, 76(20), 5964–5981. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraf323

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, 35(22), 5502–5520.e11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.10.004

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