The Role of LORELEI in Pollen Tube Reception at the Interface of the Synergid Cell and Pollen Tube Requires the Modified Eight-Cysteine Motif and the Receptor-Like Kinase FERONIA

Author Profile

Xunliang Liu

Highlighted Paper: Liu et al et al. (2016). The Role of LORELEI in Pollen Tube Reception at the Interface of the Synergid Cell and Pollen Tube Requires the Modified Eight-Cysteine Motif and the Receptor-Like Kinase FERONIA. Plant Cell. Advance Publication April 14, 2016; doi:10.1105/tpc.15.00703.

Current Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Palanivelu Lab, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Arizona.

Education: PhD: Plant Biology, Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai, China.

Non-scientific Interests: Reading, hiking, Chinese chess, and table tennis..

I was born in a small village in northwest Zhejiang province, China. My grandfather loved gardening. When I was a child, his garden was my playground, and his enthusiasm cultivated my interest in plants. I started to get interested in the biology of plants in high school. After graduation, I joined the College of Agriculture and Biotechnology in Zhejiang University to study plant science, and afterwards I joined the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology in Shanghai to pursue a doctoral degree in plant biology. During my Ph.D. studies, I developed an interest in understanding how plant cells sense environmental changes and how they coordinate their responses to these signals. When I was finishing up my Ph.D. program, I read a paper written by Dr. Kessler and Dr. Grossniklaus entitled "She's the boss: signaling in pollen tube reception", and was fascinated by the beauty of this system for studying cell?cell communication. Luckily, I got the opportunity to join Dr. Ravi Palanivelu's lab to study the function of LORELEI protein in pollen tube reception. In this project, by expressing and delivering LORELEI in the pollen tube, we demonstrated that LORELEI has a FERONIA-dependent function at the interface of the synergid cell and pollen tube during pollen tube reception.