Nothing — absolutely nothing — beats seeing an early career researcher blossom into a brilliant scientist and leader. This week brought to focus the successes of our lab alumni.
Cite as: Kamoun, S. (2022). Celebrating alumni.Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7358976
In this wet and cold week of November 21st, 2022, a series of alumni related encounters and events brought to focus the heartwarming feeling of catching up with old friends and colleagues. Nothing — absolutely nothing — beats seeing an early career researcher blossom into a brilliant scientist and leader. These are their stories.
Oxford hunters
The lab of my Oxford University colleague Renier van der Hoorn has pioneered studies on how plant hydrolases are caught up in a coevolutionary arms race with pathogen inhibitors, thus helping to define the importance of apoplastic immunity. The hunt for new pathogen inhibitors goes on. Tee and Jie are key among Renier’s team of hydrolase inhibitor hunters. On Monday, I stopped by Renier’s lab to catch up with his work and met with Tee and Jie among others.
Tee Nattapong joined the lab in July 2014 as part of the International Undergraduate Summer School, a program jointly organized by the John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL). He worked closely with an experienced scientist in the lab Vladimir Nekrasov — currently at Rothamsted Research.
Tee went on to do an MSc at Imperial College, doing research and contributing to a study on pathogen effectors with another lab alum Tolga Bozkurt, before moving to Oxford for his PhD with Gail Preston and current postdoc with Renier. Check Tee’s recent review article on how bacteria overcome flagellin detection by plants.
Jie Huang is another member of the Oxford hunters who is connected to our lab. Prior to moving to Oxford, Jie worked with lab alum Suomeng Dong at Nanjing Agricultural University (NJAU). At NJAU, Jie published a number of papers on effectors of the plant killer Phytophthora, most recently demonstrating that the pathogen modulates alternative splicing of host mRNA.
Euro Winners
The European Research Council (ERC) grants provide generous 5-year funding to scientists at all career stages. ERC Starting grants are offered to applicants with less than 7 year experience after their PhD. These grants can turbo charge the work of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) by providing stable funding that enables risky and exploratory research — precisely what ECRs should be encouraged to do. Tuesday brought the wonderful news that one Sainsbury Lab scientist, Thorsten Langner, and two alumni, Miriam Oses-Ruiz and Annis Richardson, received an #ERCStg in the latest 2022 funding round.
As seen on The Sainsbury Lab website, the news resulted in jubilant celebrations not just by the successful applicants, but also by their colleagues:
Indeed, what else brings more joy than witnessing the success of our ECRs?
Thorsten and Miriam are Master Blasters, both working on aspects of the biology and pathology of the fearsome blast fungus known as Magnaporthe oryzae. Thorsten project focuses on a pandemic strain of this fungus, which is causing havoc on wheat in South East Asia and Africa. As Thorsten wrote, he plans to “design wheat immune receptors against the pandemic wheat blast fungus by turning the host’s weak spots into a defense strategy.”
Thorsten aims to achieve his goals by focusing on the virulence effector genes that the fungus carries on an extraneous part of its genome, known as a mini-chromosome.
Over the last years, Thorsten has embraced open science and preprinting as discussed in this earlier post. For instance, his major paper on mini-chromosomes was preceded by method and dataset mini-papers that he shared with the community before formal publication in the journal PLOS Pathogens. His embrace of open science was duly noted by the ERC panelists as they wrote in the decision summary, “The applicant commitment to preprint publication and open data sharing are especially commendable.” Kudos Thorsten. Perhaps this example shows that it takes more than publishing in certain journals to convince reviewers and panelists of the value and impact of your work.
Miriam is currently a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain. She did her Ph.D. in the Exeter University lab of blast fungus wizard Nick Talbot before joining him to Norwich when he took on the TSL Executive Director post. However, Miriam’s connection to TSL dates back to before her PhD. In 2008, she did a predoc in our group working with Joe Win on molecular plant pathology projects. Get inspired by Miriam, young people! Do a predoc before starting your PhD.
Miriam wants to “know the enemy”. She aims to understand the process of cellular heterogeneity in the blast fungus and to determine how it connects to the capacity of the pathogen to infect plants. She will do this by studying the fungal structures known as appressoria that produce huge physical force to rupture the plant surface and penetrate plant tissue.
Annis is at the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences at the University of Edinburgh where she runs the Plant Shape Lab. The Lab aims at understanding how leaves and flowers get their shape, a research program that will surely be boosted by the ERC funding.
Over 10 years ago, before she became devoted to plant development, Annis joined our Lab for a PhD rotation with Sylvain Raffaele, a senior member of our team who went on a few years later to have his own ERC grant while running the Quantitative Immunity in Plants (QIP) Lab at INRAe in France.
Despite her short stay in the lab, Annis made important contributions to the work Sylvain, Tolga and others were doing at the time on identifying host cellular processes that the Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans co-opts to infect plants. This resulted in Annis co-authoring a paper that was featured on the cover of the journal Plant Physiology.
Rosalind Franklin Awardee
On Tuesday evening, a number of us headed to the Royal Society in London to attend the lecture of Diane Saunders, “how to outsmart a cereal killer”. Diane is a plant pathologist at the John Innes Centre. She was recognized by the Royal Society not just for her outstanding research — she is another ERC awardee — but also for the #WomeninWheat programme that she put together to inspire and help advance the careers of ECRs.
Diane joined the Kamoun Lab in January 2010 after completing her PhD with Nick Talbot – then at the University of Exeter – working on the blast fungus. We’re all connected to some degree. The academic network is as interconnected as a mesh of fungus hyphae.
Diane’s lecture at the Royal Society was a master class of science communication. Hers is yet another example of how being a successful scientist takes more than just chasing papers in certain journals. I can trace back Diane’s love of scicom to the work she did on the ash dieback outbreak starting from 2012 when she was at TSL. At that time, working with Kentaro Yoshida — now at Kyoto University — and TSL’s own Dan MacLean, Diane pioneered the application of open science and rapid genome sequencing to plant health emergencies — an approach that she went on to apply to wheat rust diseases, and that we used to investigate the current wheat blast pandemic.
What a week, huh?
“Captain, it’s Wednesday,” says the famous Tintin meme. There are many more alum stories to share. Some of these can be found through this Twitter search.
Addendum
Here is the video of Diane Saunders lecture at Royal Society — How to outsmart a cereal killer.
Acknowledgments
This post is deciated to all lab members, past and present. Thank you for sharing and spreading your passion of science.
