Biochemical Pathways and Environmental Responses in Plants: Part B

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.

• Protein1. Systems and strategies for plant protein expressionAnthony J. Zmuda, Thomas D. Niehaus2. Biochemical characterization of plant aromatic aminotransferasesHiroshi Maeda, Kaan Koper, Andrew Hall, Taichi Takasuka, Shogo Hataya3. Assaying plant formate-tetrahydrofolate ligase with monoglutamylated and polyglutamylated substrates using a fluorescence-HPLC based methodSanja Roje, Sompop Saeheng4. Functional analysis of phosphoethanolamine n-methyltransferases (PMT) in Plants and Parasites: Essential S-Adenosylmethionine (SAM)-dependent Methyltransferase in Choline and Phospholipid MetabolismSoon Goo Lee5. An approach to nearest neighbor analysis of pigmented protein complexes using chemical cross-linking in combination with mass specHaijun Liu6. Structural characterization of protein-DNA complexes using SAXSChloe Zubieta7. A fast and cost-effective procedure for reliable measurement of trypsin inihibitor activity in soy and soy productsHari KrishnanMetabolite8. Strategies to study the metabolic origins of specialized plant metabolitesJoshua Widhalm9. A liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based metabolomics strategy to explore plant metabolic diversityKazuki Saito, Tetsuya Mori10. Quantification of plant cardenolides by HPLC, measurement of Na+/K+-ATPase inhibition activity, and characterization of target enzymesGeorg Jander, Georg Petschenka, Tobias Züst, Anurag Agrawal, Amy Hastings11. Ex vivo metabolomics  - a hypothesis-free approach to identify native substrate(s) and product(s) of orphan enzymesKirstin Feussner12. Metabolite fingerprinting: a powerful metabolomics approach for marker identification and functional gene annotationIvo FeussnerEnvironment13. Controlled environments for cannabis cultivation to support ‘omics’ research studies and productionHannah Fleming, Zachary Chamberlain, Jordan J. Zager, B. Markus Lange14. Standard operating procedures for the comprehensive and reliable analysis of cannabis terpenesJoshua T. Polito, B. Markus Lange15. Isolation of novel chemical components and their target proteins in plants under selenium stressRyoung Shin, Makoto Muroi, Ju Yeon Moon, Takae Miyazaki, Nobomoto Watanabe16. Imaging systemic calcium response and its molecular dissection using virus-induced gene silencingSimon Gilroy17. Analysis of plant flooding responseSimon Gilroy