Kelly Dawe

ATG your career at the University of Georgia

The UGA Plant Biology Department is hiring! Please help spread the word. We have an opening for an Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. See ad for details – and join us here in Athens, GA!

The graphic features a background image of roots over a green gradient. The title says "Chris Topp Puts Down Roots at MSU PRI." There is a headshot of Chris Topp on the righthand side with the following text on the left, "Christopher N. Topp, Ph.D., Professor, Plant Resilience Institute, Department of Plant Biology, Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, Michigan State University” and the MSU PRI logo underneath.

We're excited to welcome Christopher Topp to the Plant Resilience Institute! Dr. Topp uses powerful imaging tools to envision the future of sustainable agriculture, and he will soon bring his expertise in root biology to MSU. Read the full story: plantresilience.msu.edu/pri-news/202...

Very nice looking field

Nice! I sure would like to know where this lake is to have snow this time of year

Open faculty position in computational plant synthetic biology at @universityofga.bsky.social Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences. Join us in Athens and be a part of UGA's emerging Institute of Synthetic Biology!
👉 Apply: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/429...
#SynBio #PlantScience #FacultyJobs

Two CENH3 paralogs in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have a redundantly essential function and associate with ZeppL‐LINE1 elements Histone H3 variant CENP-A/CENH3 is a conserved centromere protein in eukaryotes but has not been well characterized in green algae. Our data establish the function of CENH3 at Chlamydomonas centromer....

Two CENH3 paralogs in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have a redundantly essential function and associate with ZeppL-LINE1 elements onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... beautiful insights into the Chlamy LINE-based centromeres from the Umen and Dawe groups @corncolors.bsky.social

Amazing study from Jill Anderson, Megan Demarche and colleagues, integrating species distribution models, reciprocal transplants, snow manipulation and more to test whether a montane plant can adapt to climate change. The sad answer: not without human intervention.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Where is it?

wonderful news!

Five weeks into what has been a constant onslaught on science, working on a paper seems like such a privilege, which many of our recently fired colleagues no longer have.

And a rebellious act.

But mostly it's self-care.

(Give yourself permission to turn off the news for the weekend.)

The National Science Foundation is one of America's most precious gems

Increased maize chromosome number by engineered chromosome fission Activation of synthetic centromeres on chromosome 4 in maize leads to its breakage and formation of trisomic fragments called neochromosomes. A limitation of neochromosomes is their low and unpredicta...

Yibing Zeng used synthetic centromeres to break chromosome 4 into two separate chromosomes (4a and 4b), raising the diploid chromosome number of maize from 20 to 22. The resulting plants grew and reproduced normally. We call this process engineered chromosome fission www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Antagonistic kinesin-14s within a single chromosomal drive haplotype In maize, there are two meiotic drive systems that operate on large tandem repeat arrays called knobs that are found on chromosome arms. One meiotic drive haplotype, Abnormal chromosome 10 (Ab10), enc...

Meghan Brady showed that one of the kinesins (Trkin) on the Ab10 meiotic drive haplotype does not serve a useful function in drive or fitness. Anjali Gupta and Rob Unckless used modeling to show that Ab10 Trkin should not persist. Something strange is going on www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Higher order repeat structures reflect diverging evolutionary paths in maize centromeres and knobs Background Highly repetitive tandem repeat arrays, known as satellite DNAs, are frequently found in low recombination regions such as centromeres. Satellite arrays often contain complex internal struc...

Rebecca Piri showed that the maize centromere repeat CentC likely does not have a role in centromere function, whereas knob repeat arrays (involved in meiotic drive) have conserved higher order repeats (HORs) and huge repeat units of ~1 Mb that are shared among knobs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am pleased to introduce three papers from our lab this week, describing the structure of repeat arrays, the fitness effects of a key meiotic drive gene, and karyotype engineering.