On March 28th, Prof. Sabeeha Merchant, member of NAS, attended 16th “Advanced Integrative Biology Forum” and gave a report entitled "Synchronized cell ‘omics’, a day in the life of Chlamydomonas", at the invitation of Prof. Duanmu Deqiang from College of Life Science and Technology of HZAU. The forum is presided by Prof. Wang Xuelu, Dean of College of Life Science and Technology, attracting about 400 students and teachers to attend. It is the one of the academic reports held for celebrating 120th anniversary of HZAU.
At the beginning of the report, taking Chlamydomonas reinhardtii for example, Prof. Sabeeha Merchant introduced the application of genomics in biological research. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a single-celled eukaryotic algae that is a model organism for the study of photosynthesis, lipid metabolism, phototaxis, and structure and movement of flagella. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can synchronize cells during the light-dark cycle. Therefore, the genomic research of these synchronized Chlamydomonas cells can report the corresponding changes in a single cell to some extent. Some parameters of the entire cell cycle during the light-dark cycle of cells, such as size and number of cell, chlorophyll content, respiration, transcriptome data, etc., are determined, revealing the sequence of events occurring in the cell cycle. In addition, it is possible to establish corresponding gene expression patterns and further reveal the environmental pressure, response genes and novel signal pathways generated in the light-dark cycle transition process through the study of gene expression changes in different physiological processes under the light-dark cycle. After the report, there was a heated discussion between Prof. Sabeeha Merchant and the teachers and students.
As the editor-in-chief of Annual Review of Plant Biology and Plant Cell, Prof. Merchant also gave an introduction to Plant Cell, detailing the editorial board and staff, submission process, and policies adjustment of the publisher. She stressed that the integrity of the story and the novelty of the mechanism are very important for an academic paper. Finally, with some examples, she clearly explained the entire submission process, so that teachers and students can have a better understanding of the process of article publishing in Plant Cell.
Prof. Merchant conducted in-depth exchanges with research teams and teachers from the College of Life Science and Technology, College of Plant Sciences and Technology, National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, and the State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology.
【Profile】Prof. Sabeeha Merchant is an internationally renowned botanist. She is the member of the American Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the German Academy of Sciences. Prof. Merchant graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1983 with a PhD. in biochemistry and molecular biology; from 1984 to 1987, she engaged in postdoctoral research at Harvard University. She joined UCLA in 1987 and is currently a UCLA tenured professor and director of the UCLA Genomics and Proteomics Institute.
Prof. Merchant has made outstanding contribution in the research of micro-elements in plant, chloroplast biosynthesis and algal genomics. Her researches have been financially supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other private foundations. She has published more than 150 papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Plant Cell, and PNAS. She has won numerous awards from the American Botanical Society, the American Academy of Sciences, and the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Prof. Merchant is currently the editor-in-chief of Annual Review of Plant Biology and Plant Cell.
http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2018/0403/51664.shtml
Translated by: Ye Mengxia
Proofread by: Wang Xiaoyan
