Center Devoted to Plant Cell Biology Research Celebrates Ten Years of Growth

Ceremony recognizing top research breakthroughs and key milestones of UC Riverside’s Center for Plant Cell Biology set for Dec. 14

By Iqbal Pittalwala on December 10, 2012

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — When the Center for Plant Cell Biology (CEPCEB) was launched at the University of California, Riverside in 2002, it was home to ten faculty members from three departments on campus.  Ten years later, the center’s membership has grown to 43 scientists from 13 UC Riverside departments, and its reputation has soared, firmly establishing it as one of the world’s top centers devoted to the study of plant cell biology.

On Dec. 14, 2012, UCR will celebrate the center’s first decade in a daylong (9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) ceremony in the Genomics Building on campus, followed by a reception in the lobby.  More than 100 researchers will attend the celebration and participate in a special symposium aimed at recognizing the center’s significant achievements and discussing the latest research being conducted in the field of plant cell biology.

During the ceremony, Julia Bailey-Serres, a longtime CEPCEB member and a professor of genetics in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, will be named CEPCEB’s new director.  Starting Jan. 1, 2013, she will succeed Natasha Raikhel, a distinguished professor of plant cell biology, who has served as CEPCEB’s director since its inception.

The university recruited Raikhel, one of the most highly-cited researchers in plant science, in 2001 to lead the new center.  Within months, Raikhel hired key personnel — such as David Carter, Thomas Girke, Songqin Pan and Glenn Hicks — to coordinate and manage the center’s state-of-the-art core instrumentation facilities that offer an integrated system of instruments allowing for chemical genomics research on plants and the analysis of unprecedented quantities of information yielded from genome and protein sequencing.

“People love and enjoy plants but do not often remember how essential plants are for our well being and health and for a sustainable global environment,” said Raikhel, who holds the Ernst and Helen Leibacher Endowed Chair in Plant Molecular, Cell Biology & Genetics and is the director of the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology within which CEPCEB is housed.  “Plants can live without us, but we cannot live without plants!  We know a lot at the genetic level about the way plants develop and respond and adapt to environmental conditions. But we know very little about what is happening on a cellular level to proteins in live cells during development or in response to different environmental conditions — knowledge that is critical to addressing the challenges we face with the increasing worldwide demand for food, global warming, and biofuel production.”

Under Raikhel’s leadership, CECEB grew from an idea of interdisciplinary collaborative research to a world-leading center of plant sciences and genome research.  It was largely due to her efforts that the center succeeded in hiring excellent scientists to build a strong, cohesive and integrative research program in plant cell biology, quickly making UCR an internationally recognized center for plant cell biology and plant biology.  Within a matter of years, the center enjoyed a unique niche in the field of plant biology, having effectively integrated computation biology, proteomics and chemical genomics to investigate key questions in plant biology.

In the past ten years, CEPCEB achieved several milestones, a few of which are:

• A $2.9 million grant in 2005 from the National Science Foundation for an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Trainee program.
• Bailey-Serres named the lead recipient of the 2008 USDA National Research Initiative Discovery Award for her landmark work on submergence tolerance in rice.
• Xuemei Chen named in 2011 a Howard Hughes Medical Institute — Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator.
• A highly competitive $9 million five-year grant to Howard Judelson in 2011 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to research late blight.
• Sue Wessler elected in 2011 as home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences for a four-year term.
• Raikhel is elected in 2012 as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I have been always amazed how quickly CEPCEB put Riverside on the map of world-class plant science,” said Jiri Friml, a professor in the Department of Plant Systems Biology at the University of Ghent, Belgium.  “How from modest beginnings it suddenly rose to one of the very best plant centers world-wide with the amazing assembly of talented researchers pushing the frontiers in their various areas.”

Friml refers to the many scientific breakthroughs by CEPCEB members, such as:

• Shou-wei Ding’s lab discovered in 2002 that when animal cells are attacked by a virus, the cells use RNA silencing to protect themselves from the virus.
• In 2004, Raikhel’s lab identified a key enzyme that triggers programmed cell death, an important process plants undergo in fighting off bacterial, fungal or viral infections.
• Zhenbiao Yang’s lab successfully unlocked in 2005 the mechanism creating jigsaw puzzle-like plant cells in thin structures such as leaves.
• In 2006, Bailey-Serres’s group discovered that a single gene, Sub1A, enables rice to survive submergence.
• Sean Cutler’s lab showed in 2009 how a stress hormone produced naturally by plants helps them survive by inhibiting their growth in times when water is unavailable.
• In 2009, Timothy Close and Stefano Lonardi advanced their work on sequencing the barley genome and breeding new barley varieties.
• Wenbo Ma performed research in 2011 that advanced scientists’ understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, elucidating how plants fight disease.
• In 2012, Yinsheng Wang and colleagues showed how DNA damage caused by anticancer drugs and environmental chemicals ultimately impedes protein synthesis.

“CEPCEB has created a highly collegiate and supportive research environment, such that scientists are nurtured in their ideas and encouraged to be imaginative in their research,” said Cathie R. Martin, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and a professor at the University of East Anglia, the United Kingdom.  “From this comes true innovation and creative energy.”

CEPCEP researchers have won numerous awards and honors.  Currently, the center is home to two members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, three recipients of the Charles Albert Shull Award, two winners of the Stephen Hales Prize, three fellows of the American Society of Plant Biologists, and four recipients of the National Science Foundation CAREER Awards.

“Just about every day I see vibrant groups of CEPCEB scientists discussing their discoveries, inquiries and collaborations in the Genomics Building,” Raikhel said.  “That’s when I feel that what I dreamed of achieving when CEPCEB was founded ten years ago is a reality.  It makes me very happy and proud of all our talented and driven scientists and educators.”

Archived under: Inside UCR, Science/Technology, anniversary, Center for Plant Cell Biology, CEPCEB, Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, Julia Bailey-Serres, Natasha Raikhel, plant cell biology, press release

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