The third-floor lunch party attracted over 40 students, postdocs, and staff members from the Chen lab, Pierce-Shimomura lab, Sullivan lab, Trent lab, and Whiteley lab, all housed in the third floor of the Neural and Molecular Sciences (NMS) Building.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
News
December 4, 2008
Misook Ha graduated in December 2009 with a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology (Bioinformatics and Computational Biology track). She will work as a postdoctoral fellow in Computational Biology on elucidating the mechanisms for expression evolution in Arabidopsis
November 24, 2008
Circadian Rhythms and Hybrid Vigor – Hybrid plants, like corn, grow bigger and better than their parents because many of their genes for photosynthesis and starch metabolism are more active during the day, report researchers from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study published in the journal Nature
Genomes Assembled from Five Cotton Species Could Lead to Better Varieties
AUSTIN, Texas, April 20, 2020 – Cotton producers in Texas, elsewhere in the US and around the world are looking for new varieties that can better withstand droughts, pests and pathogens, yet yield higher-quality fibers for the textile industry. To help accelerate the breeding and improvement of cotton varieties, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere teamed up to produce the reference-grade genomes of all five species, including two cultivated cottons. Their results were published in the journal Nature Genetics. Read full stories from NSF, UT Austin, and Texas AgriLife.
Researchers Create Largest Ever Map of Plant Proteins and Their Assemblies
AUSTIN, Texas, April 2, 2020 – In a new paper in Cell, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin offer the largest survey to date of proteins in plants, examining 13 different species across 1.1 billion years of plant evolution. Their findings could have practical applications such as increasing crop yields, understanding disease and stress resistance in plants and informing biofuel production. Read full story.
Scientists Uncover RNA Silencing Technique to Change Seed Size in Plants
AUSTIN, Texas, January 28, 2019 – In a development with promising implications for crop farmers in the U.S. and around the world, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have figured out how to get some plants to produce nearly one-third bigger seeds. Full Article
Biologists Find Day and Night Pathways Regulating Plant Growth Vigor
AUSTIN, Texas, May 8, 2018 – Scientists are slowly unravelling the complex molecular pathways that regulate growth vigor in plant hybrids, with the goal of eventually developing hybrid crops that can grow faster and more productively, while at the same time doing a better job of resisting stress such as heat, drought and pests. Many crops such as corn are grown as hybrids for better yield and traits.
… read moreFirst Step Taken Toward Epigenetically Modified Cotton
AUSTIN, Texas, May 31, 2017 — With prices down and weather patterns unpredictable, these are tough times for America’s cotton farmers, but new research led by Z. Jeffrey Chen at The University of Texas at Austin might offer a break for the industry. He and a team have taken the first step toward a new way of breeding heartier, more productive cotton through a process called epigenetic modification. Read more
November 21, 2008
The annual Cotton Fiber Genomics project meeting was held in Austin. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and focused on “Genetic and Functional Genomic Analysis of Early Events in Cotton Fiber Development”. The attendees of the meeting include:
PI: Chen Lab (David Pang, Yuki Guan, Misook Ha, Vikram Agarwal, UT-Austin)
Co-PI: Triplett Lab (He Jim Kim, Doug Hinchliffe, USDA-ARS/UNO)
Co-PI: David Stelly (Shivapriya Manchali, Texas A&M)
Co-PI: Peggy Thaxton (Mississippi State University)
Co-PI: Sing-Hoi Sze (Texas A&M)
Collaborator: Candace Haigler (North Carolina State University)
Collaborator: Brian Scheffler (USDA ARS MSA Genomics Laboratory, Stoneville, MS)
Collaborator: Pablo Rabinowicz (Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland)
Industry Representative: Don Jones (Cotton Incorporated)
Upland cotton: an improved sequence will advance fiber, fuel and food applications
April 11, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire: A consortium led by Z. Jeffrey Chen of The University of Texas at Austin and Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology has made publicly available a significantly improved high-quality genome sequence of Upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). This sequence of the species making up greater than 90% of the world’s spinnable cotton fiber builds upon previous genome sequences published in the past five years. The data is downloadable at DOE JGI Phytozome Gossypium hirsutum v1.1. Read more
