Biochemical Pathways and Environmental Responses in Plants: Part C

Prof. Jez received his B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State University (1992), a Ph.D. in biochemistry & molecular biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania (1998), and was an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1998-2001). After working as a research scientist at Kosan Biosciences (2001-2002), he started his research group at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and moved to the Department of Biology at Washington University in 2008. He has authored more than 160 papers and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2005), the Phytochemical Society of North America's Arthur Neish Young Investigator Award (2007), and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award (2012) and was named as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2014. Research in the Jez lab seeks to understand how environmental changes re-model biochemical pathways in plants at the molecular, cellular, and organism levels with the aim of engineering these systems to address agricultural and environmental problems. Current work in the lab employs a combination of structural biology, protein chemistry, and plant biology. He also launched the Biotech Explorers Program, which aims to introduce undergraduates to how teams in science can tackle real world problems using cross-disciplinary approaches.

Protein 1. Preparation of hydroxycinnamoyl-CoA thioesters using recombinant 4-coumarate:coenzyme A ligase (4CL) for characterization of BAHD acyltransferases Michael Sullivan 2. Near-real time determination of BAHD acyl-coA transferase reaction rates Michael Sullivan 3. Bioinformatic tools for protein structure prediction and for molecular docking applied to enzyme active site analysis Michael Sullivan & Amanda Fanelli 4. Computational and biochemical methods to measure the activity of carboxysomes and protein organelles in vivo Jeffrey Cameron 5. Dirigent Proteins Family Function and Structure Norman Lewis

Metabolite 6. Three-in-One Method for High-throughput plant multi-omics Sixue Chen 7. Analysis of isoprenyl-phosphates by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry Peter Doermann 8. Lignin/Lignan Biosynthesis Structure/Function Norman Lewis 9. Comparsion of TLC, HPLC, and direct infusion mass spectrometry methods for identification and quantification of diacylglycerol molecular species Phil Bates 10. Plant sphingolipid analysis Jennifer Markam

Environment 11. RNA-seq analysis of alternative pre-mRNA splicing mediated by photoreceptors in Physcomitrium patens Shih-Long Tu 12. Monitoring lipid-protein interactions in planta using Forster resonance energy transfer Sam Wang 13. Acetylene reduction assay for nitrogenase activity under salinity stress Senthil Subramanian and Liping Gu 14. Assessing simultaneious reversible cysteine oxidation and global abundance in plant tissues Leslie Hicks 15. High-throughput phenotyping and the use of computer vision to unravel novel phenotypes associated with plant nutrition David Mendoza-Cozatl 16. Using Hyper as a Molecular Probe to visualize hydrogen peroxide in living cells Luis Cardenas 17. A new probe DC_-Rho1 for visualizing protein sulfenylation in living plant cells Luis Cardenas