A great occasion for the lab!

Congratulations to new Drs Bo Xu and Manchun Zhao, and Masters degree recipient Yue Qu all graduating yesterday.

Manchun's PhD thesis was entitled "CO2 and ion transport through plant aquaporins" (supervised by Steve Tyerman) and Bo Xu's "Characterisation of a novel calcium sensor in Arabidopsis".

Yue Qu's Masters thesis was on the "Salt tolerance mechanisms in soybean"

Some photos from the day, more to follow.

Left to right - Prof Steve Tyerman, Dr Manchun Zhao, Dr Bo Xu, Dr Matt Gilliham, Mr Yue Qu

Matt and Weasley!

 

Best Masters Student in Plant Biotechnology

Yue Qu, tonight picked up the Best Master's in Plant Biotechnology student tonight at the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine Prize giving, having come top of his year group. Congratulations to Yue for his hard work over the last couple of years - especially his year long project in our lab looking into the salinity tolerance mechanisms of soybean.

The great news for us is that Yue has also secured a PhD scholarship with us to continue his research.

We were lucky to have two great students this year from the Masters course, with Sana Ullah who gained new insights into the control of hypocotyl elongation in Arabidopsis. Sana is now in New Zealand with his family and is looking to continue his very promising research career.

Yue follows in the footsteps of other students from this program to join the lab for their PhD. This includes Brad Hocking and Bo Xu - who also received this prize for 2008 and 2009 respectively - and the equally as capable Jiaen Qiu who is currently writing up her PhD thesis. 

Prize sponsors were the ACPFG

Yue Qu with Eileen Scott, Head of School

ARC Centre for Excellence in Plant Energy Biology

Our new cross-disciplinary centre, involving researchers at the University of Western Australia, La Trobe, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide has been funded from 2014 to 2020.

Looking forward to getting started once all the funding agreements are signed!

The focus of the centre is examining how plants use energy, particularly under stress, and see if there are ways in which we can streamline these processes in crop plants to improve yield.

Our new website is now active and is currently being populated, it will eventually contain full details of our novel approaches and our sub-programs that are designed to get a handle on the key drivers of plant energy use.

Chief Investigators of the new centre are:

UWA - Proteomics, Signalling and Epigenetics
Harvey Millar (Centre Director)
Ian Small
Ryan Lister
Rana Munns

La Trobe - Metabolic signalling
Jim Whelan

ANU - Ecophysiology, natural variation and signalling
Barry Pogson
Owen Atkin
Justin Borevitz

Adelaide - Transport and signalling
Steve Tyerman
Matt Gilliham

In a great piece of foresight at the ARC, they have also funded an equivalent centre in translational photosynthesis. We plan to collaborate with these researchers. The plan in 7 years is that we can find ways to not only improve energy use efficiency in plants, but we can also identify ways in which we can increase the amount of energy that plants can capture through photosynthesis.

Busy and exciting times!