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Graduate student Hong-Guo Yu
Graduated with a Ph.D. in the Spring 2000. Hong-Guo developed a live imaging method for meiocytes and, along with other techniques, showed that neocentromeres move 50% faster than normal centromeres and interact with microtubules in a novel way. He also published the first study of spindle checkpoint proteins in plants, and showed that kinetochores are functionally redundant. Hong-Guo received research awards from both the Department and the University. Dr. Yu was a postdoc in Douglas Koshland's group and is now an Assistant Professor at Florida State University.
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Graduate student Evelyn Hiatt
Graduated with a Ph.D. in the Fall of 2000. Evelyn discovered and carefully characterized six new mutants of meiotic drive, many of which are large deficiencies. These and other data demonstrated that meiotic drive is conferred by at least four different genes on Ab10. She also showed that the two classes of knob repeats are independently regulated as neocentromeres, suggesting that satellites and their binding proteins co-evolve to assure their preferential recovery. Dr. Hiatt is now an Assisant Professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College.
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Graduate student Joshua Marshall
Graduated with a M.S. in the Summer of 2001. Josh developed a unique application of flourescense resonance energy transfer (FRET) for the analysis of kinetochore structure. Using our set of kinetochore antibodies, he demonstrated that the maize kinetochore is composed of two major subdomains: the inner containing centromeric DNA and CENPC, and the outer containing MAD2. Josh also carried out the first experiments showing that CENH3 is phosphorylated. He is now with Cardinal Health as a nuclear pharmacist.
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Graduate student Carolyn Lawrence, Co-advised by Dawe and Malmberg.
Graduated with a PhD in the summer of 2003. Carolyn used the novel (for the time) approach of using maximum likelihood methods to construct a phylogeny of kinesin superfamily. Her phylogeny, and a personal ambition to make it stick, ultimately lead to the creation and adoption of a standarized kinesin nomenclature. She was also the first to show that angiosperms lack dynein. Carolyn blazed her own trail and made a major impact on the kinesin field. Carolyn worked as a postdoc with Volker Brendel, and is now a USDA group leader and the Director of www.maizegdb.org at Iowa State University. Here is Carolyn's lab web page.
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Graduate student Rebecca Mroczek
Graduated with a PhD in the summer of 2003. Using a variety of molecular techniques and a previously characterized set of Ab10 deficiencies, Becky mapped the Ab10 chromosome as it relates to N10. Her detailed RFLP map demonstrated that the the meiotic drive system includes at least two large inversions, and that the primary drive functions map to novel (alien) chromatin. She also carried out a FISH study of retrotransposon density on Ab10, which supported the view that the haplotype is ancient. Becky is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith.
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Graduate student Xiaolan Zhang, Co-advised by Scanlon and Dawe
Graduated with a PhD in the summer of 2007. Xiaolan spent a total of ~2 years in the Dawe lab, first on a long rotation where she completed a major paper on the phosphorylation of maize CENH3, and later when her primary PI, Dr. Scanlon, left for Cornell. She is skilled with a microscope and helped train many students in the art of sample preparation and analysis. Xiaolan is now a postdoc with Elliot Meyerowitz pursuing her interest in plant developmental biology.
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Postdoctoral Fellow Cathy Xaioyan Zhong, co-employed by Wayne Parrott
Cathy worked in the lab from the Spring of 2000 through early 2003. She was the first person on our newly-funded (first round) Plant Genome Grant. Among other things, Cathy developed the maize CENH3-mediated chromatin immunoprecipitation technique that has be instrumental in our recent progress. She also developed constructs for maize and rice transformation, helped with the CENH3 phosphorylation study, and carried out the initial experiments showing that centromeric RNA is immunoprecipitated along with centromeric chromatin. Cathy is now employed as Research Scientist at Dupont, Wilmington, Delaware.
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Technician Juliana Melo
Juliana worked as an undergraduate-then-technician from Fall 2001 through the summer of 2004. She had a major impact on the productivity of the lab. She helped Becky finish her Ab10 mapping, mapped the maize CENH3 gene using oat-maize addition lines, cloned and sequenced hundreds of CentC repeats, and - most impressively - cloned the oat Cenh3 gene by degenerate PCR. Juliana fulfilled her long-term goal of entering the Medical College of Georgia in the Fall of 2004.
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Technician Amy Luce
Amy started as a technician in January 2005 and moved on to Mercer Medical School in August of 2006. She is a PCR master. Favorite quote: "that just goes to show you how easily PCR is intimidated". She developed transposon junction mapping and moved the lab further into genomics. Her no-fear approach allowed her to break the single copy ChIP barrier in our lab, and with the newly-developed junction mapping strategy, pave the way to mapping all ten maize centromeres with precision. She finished two papers in a short year and a half.
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