At the invitation of Professor Liu Jihong of Fruit Trees Department of School of Landscape Architecture, Professor Ramanjulu Sunkar of Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Oklahoma State University comes to our college for a visit and an academic exchange.

He gives a lecture in Classroom 401 of Teaching Building 2 on horticulture development, focusing on the theme of "Plant MicroRNAs: Targets for improving biomass production and stress tolerance". Raman tells us that, through his research he hopes to find the major factors regulated by post transcriptional genes with small RNA function as the guiding mode so as to achieve the goal of effective biomass production and stress tolerance, as is the current stage of their study of microRNA and its target gene families, including miRNA156, miRNA398, miRNA39 and other small RNA. Among them, the miRNA156 can significantly improve the biomass of plants such as arabidopsis thaliana, switchgrass and etc. MiRNA398 and its downstream target genes CSD2, CSD1 have played an important role in scavenging active oxygen. MiRNA395 is induced by copper derivatives, and responds significantly to heavy metal ion stress.

Subsequently, several graduate students from the Fruit Trees Department whose research direction is molecular stress show to Professor RamanjuluSunkar their progress in their own projects, and Professor RamanjuluSunkar, combining their situation with his own research area and aiming at the problems existing in the subject, the development trend, thesis writing and so on, give them some advices.

It is the first time that Professor RamanjuluSunkar came to our school, and he marveled at the profound and solid foundation of research and beautiful campus environment, and therefore he looked forward to further cooperation in terms of scientific research in stress.

(By Xuan Jian, Li Buorui and Du Gunwei)

(Instructor: Yuan Yinfeng)

http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2016/0505/45451.shtml