Author: mcfarlane

Talks & Presentations

Hear about our work at ICAR

Natalie & Heather will be attending the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, held virtually this year.  Heather will give a talk in the Cell Wall session on “Fortifying the plant cell wall under stress: 7TM proteins promote CSC trafficking”.

Heather and Jacqueline Monaghan from Queen’s University will also run a workshop “Running a Research Group in the next generation” which features an exciting lineup of three fantastic female group leaders: Siobhan Brady, Liz Haswell, and Sonali Roy.

Lab Updates

Welcome Carlo

The McFarLab welcomes new PhD student Carlo Perolo.  Carlo joins the lab having completed his BSc at the University of Padua and his MSc with Prof. Lorella Navazio at the University of Padua. During his MSc, he conducted an ERASMUS+ internship at with Prof. Markus Teige at University of Vienna in Austria.  Carlo will be co-supervised by Heather and Nick Provart and will use cell wall synthesis as a model system to test bioinformatic predictions.  Welcome Carlo!

Lab Updates

An exciting new member joins the McFarLab

Welcome to our latest lab member, the Nikon Spinning Disk Microscope. Purchased with the support of the Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund and matching funds from the Ontario Research Fund, this microscope will be used extensively by all lab members and by other scientists in the CSB. The microscope features lasers and optics to excite UV, CFP, GFP, YFP, and RFP, and will also be used for photoactivation, photoconversion, and photobleaching (FRAP) studies. It also features a fully automated XYZ stage and piezo-Z drive, the CSU-W1 spinning disk and dual sCMOS setup allows ultra-fast simultaneous imaging of two wavelengths at a time. We’ve got lots of exciting questions to answer with this microscope and we welcome external users and collaborators!

Lab Updates

Welcome Carlos, Erik, Jenny, Rowan, and Stephanie

Welcome summer students!  Carlos, Rowan, and Stephanie are new to the McFarLab. Carlos is a new volunteer in the lab who will be conducting a virtual project. Rowan is a Plant Genomics and Biotechnology Focus student who has been awarded an NSERC-USRA to work in the lab. Stephanie is an undergraduate at the University of Hong Kong who was awarded a MITACS GlobaLink Internship to undertake a virtual internship in the McFarLab.

Erik and Jenny are returning McFarLab students. Erik completed his BCB330 project in the McFarLab and has re-joined as virtual volunteer. Jenny completed her CSB498 project in the McFarLab and has re-joined as a part-time research assistant.

Welcome everyone!

New Papers

Another new paper in Developmental Cell

Our latest paper on plant responses to cell wall signaling: “A G protein-coupled receptor-like module regulates cellulose synthase secretion from the endomembrane system in Arabidopsis” is now available online at Developmental Cell!

The cell wall provides mechanical support and protection to plant cells. Since plant cells must grow and develop within the confines of their cell wall, there is constant communication between the plant cell and its cell wall, called cell wall signaling. In this paper, we investigate the way that plants respond to signals that the cell wall is weak or damaged. We characterize a mechanism by which plants fortify their cell walls in response to stress and find that this mechanism acts through a G-protein coupled receptor-like module that facilitates secretion of cell wall synthesis enzymes.

doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2021.03.031

New Papers

New paper in Developmental Cell

Natalie’s review, “Subcellular Coordination of Plant Cell Wall Synthesis” is now available online with Developmental Cell.

Have you ever wondered how different parts of the cell coordinate their action to contribute to overall cell function?

Together with Samuel King and Lacey Samuels, from UBC Botany, we reviewed molecular mechanisms that control cell wall biosynthesis in the context of their different subcellular locations and examined how these mechanisms are regulated in response to different perturbations to maintain cell wall homeostasis.

Free access to the article is provided by Cell Press here: doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2021.03.004