Associate Professor Jing-Ke Weng of the Whitehead Institute and MIT is the recipient of a $1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to develop new biotechnologies that enable directed evolution of metabolic enzymes at will. If successful, this project will have a transformative impact upon multiple fields by enabling the unprecedented capability to create new designer medicines and commodity chemicals.
Tomas’ paper on elucidation of kavalactone biosynthesis in Polynesian medicinal plant kava kava is published at Nature Plants. See the news release from MIT News here and NPR here.
Unusual Labmates is a multimedia series exploring some of the uncommon species used for research at Whitehead Institute. The recent entry features fireflies, including the American species Photinus pyralis and the Japanese species Aquatica lateralis, which the Weng lab is using to better understand the ability to emit light. Click here to experience a multimedia story about fireflies, including how we rear them in the lab and what we hope to learn from investigating their biology.
We warmly welcome Jeandele Elliot from Howard University, Uriel Garcia and George Yacoub from Williams College to carry out summer research in the lab!
We warmly welcome Colin Kim, our very first Biological Engineering student, and Wentao Huang of Biology to join the lab!
Yasmin Chau, Tim Fallon and Geoff Liou successfully defended their PhD thesis in May. Congratulations to all three for this monumental career achievement!
Matthew Hill receives the 2019 NSF graduate research fellowship! Big congrats!
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
Joe Jacobowitz’s paper on the function of two genetically redundant peroxidases in Arabidopsis pollen development is published this week in the journal Plant Cell. Congrats! Check out the Whitehead Institute news release here.
Electromicroscopy image of an Arabidopsis anther (yellow) filled with pollen grains (purple). Credit: Joseph Jacobowitz and Nicki Watson/Whitehead Institute
A fruitful pursuit: plant biology at whitehead institute
Decades of pioneering plant research at Whitehead Institute have led to biological insights and useful discoveries in the labs of Founding Member Gerald Fink, Member Mary Gehring, and Member Jing-Ke Weng.
Graduate student Joe Jacobowitz featured by MIT Biology on his thesis work analyzing new enzymes that could reveal key insights into pollen development and plant reproduction. Congrats!
