News

Scaffolding the nursery of pollen development.

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

Sporopollenin structure unraveled!

The Weng lab resolved the molecular structure of pine sporopollenin. A paper describing this work is published today at Nature Plants. The news release from the Whitehead institute can be accessed here. Special thanks to the Hong lab of MIT Chemistry, our fantastic collaborator on this project!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Electron micrograph of mixed plant pollen grains. Credit: Louisa Howard.

Jing-Ke Weng receives the inaugural Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award.

Jing-Ke Weng is one of the five recipients of the Inaugural Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award. Building on the successful 25-year history of the Smith Family Awards Program for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the Foundation created the Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award in 2017 to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences. The Odyssey Awards support the pursuit of high-impact ideas to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical research. The awards fund high-risk, high-reward pilot projects solicited from the brightest junior faculty in the region.