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Julia @juliazheku.bsky.social made some microscopic slides for @kamdiehl.bsky.social Kamryn's TA class (BIOL 200 | Cell Biology).

The goal is to push some plant cell biology samples as a teaching tool.

Corn 🌽 root cross section under the scope.

Introducing @kamdiehl.bsky.social Kamryn as a new graduate student in the lab

Kamryn did her undergrad at UBC in a combined major in physics, computer science, and biology, and did her MSc with Geoff Wasteneys working on plant cell biology

Welcome to the gang!

www.ashraflab.com/team.html

Recent update: An incredible video captured by Kamryn @kamdiehl.bsky.social

You will see what happens to the cell with GLOOP (gentle lysis of obstructive protoplasm) solution incubation.

Microtubule plus-end dynamics are tightly coupled to the turnover of the MOR1 polymerase https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.30.621176v1

(10/17) We tested that by treating CDKA;1-mVenus with Olomoucine. The CDKA;1-mVenus signal goes down with Olomoucine treatment and reverts back during the recovery. This suggests Olomoucine blocks CDKA;1 reversibly.

(9/17) Kamryn tested Olomoucine (Red) binding (yellow) with CDKA;1 (cyan). She found that Olomoucine occupies the same binding site of ATP. As ATP binds reversibly, we hypothesized Olomoucine may act reversibly too.

(8/17) Kamryn ran a molecular dynamics simulation and showed that ATP (Magenta) binds (yellow) with CDKA;1 (cyan). This known interaction confirms that we had a good AlphaFold-based 3D structure of CDKA1 and molecular dynamic simulation pipeline established.

(7/17) Among these, CDKA1 controls both G1 to S and G2 to M transitions. But, loss of function of CDKA1 causes the male gametophyte lethality. So, we used a chemical, Olomoucine, approach to block CDKA1.

(4/17) That was exciting! Olivia went ahead to test stress recovery for salt, osmotic, cold, and heat. We ended up with a massive dataset and got lost in quantification.

41,913 cells counted!!!

(1/17) We are excited to share the Ashraf and Gallagher labs collaboration on cell cycle regulation during environmental stress recovery in Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, and ryegrass.

Cell cycle follows pause and play mechanism in environment stress recovery in diverse plant species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646900v1