Team
The Cell Wall in Plant Immunity Team:
Marc Somssich
Marc @ Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=-YhIzdMAAAAJ&hl=en
Marc @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/somssichm
Marc @ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5092-6168
Marc @ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Somssich
Liu Wang
Liu studied food biotechnology at China Agricultural University in Beijing, China. For her Master’s thesis in the lab of A/Prof. Lin Shen she studied the drought stress response in tomato, establishing CRISPR-Cas9-mediated genome editing of tomato in her lab. Feeling the pressure to publish a first-author paper from her thesis, she somewhat overshot the mark and published three within a year. Having generated CRISPR-Cas9-edited tomato lines for different MAPKs to build the lab’s future research on, co-authorship on several future papers was secured and she therefore decided to move on. After receiving a PhD-scholarship from the Chinese Scholarship Council, she joined Prof. Staffan Persson’s Plant Cell Biology lab at the University of Melbourne to study salinity tolerance in plants, thereby building on her experience studying drought tolerance, but switching from the cool tomato plant to the general model Arabidopsis thaliana. Taking over a project from Marc, and being co-supervised by Staffan and Marc, she was automatically usurped by the newly formed Cell Wall in Plant Immunity Team. For her work, Liu focuses on the role of the COMPANION OF CELLULOSE SYNTHASE 1 (CC1) protein in maintaining cell wall synthesis under salt stress, and how it connects cellulose synthesis activity to cytoskeleton-dynamics. Furthermore, she has quickly become the resident expert for protein-immunoprecipitation experiments with subsequent proteomic analyses, creating protein-protein-interaction and phosphoproteomic data resources for the lab, thereby enabling new student projects and once again ensuring her place on the author list of several upcoming papers.
Liu @ Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W209SQoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
Liu @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Liu_Wang1
Jacob Calabria
Jacob studied genetics for his bachelor’s degree at the University of Melbourne, and subsequently completed his Master’s thesis in the Drosophila lab of Dr. Michael Murray. For his project he identified genes regulating the mesenchymal to epithelial cell transition during development of the Drosophila melanogaster embryo midgut, as this cell transition is important not only for normal embryo development, but also has relevance for tissue repair and cancer metastasis. Following his time in the genetics department, Jacob assumed the role of a research technician for both, Prof. Staffan Persson’s Plant Cell Biology lab and Dr. Berit Ebert’s Plant Glycobiology lab, in order to gain more practical experience working in a molecular biology lab. He quickly earned a reputation as a highly skilled, talented and motivated technician, thereby qualifying to also work for Marc’s Cell Wall in Plant Immunity Team. As part of the Team, one of Jacob’s main objectives is to establish a transformation protocol for canola, in order to obtain fluorescent marker lines.
Cooperations:
Staffan Persson
Being part of Staffan‘s Plant Cell Biology lab, and being provided with office and lab space, as well as equipment, financial support and intellectual input from Staffan, one might say that our team is dependent on him.
Alexander Idnurm
Since none of us are experts in Mycology, or know how to handle pathogenic fungi, we are lucky to have the Mycology Team of A/Prof. Alexander Idnurm housed in our School of BioSciences building. Alex and his team are not just general experts for fungi, but are a leading lab for plant pathogenic fungi. Their main focus lies on Leptosphaeria maculans, the causal agent of blackleg disease in canola, for our joined project, however, they are more than happy to work with Fusarium oxysporum and have already created a whole suit of fluorescent marker lines for us to work with.
Biological Optical Microscopy Platform (BOMP)
A big part of the work in our team is based on fluorescent microscopy. Accordingly, BOMP is an important partner for us at the University. They provide us with modern, serviced microscopes, as well as image analysis software, know-how, trainings and workshops.