Crystal Structure of the GRAS Domain of SCARECROW-LIKE7 in Oryza sativa

Author Profile

Shengping Li and Yanhe Zhao

Highlighted Paper: Li et al et al. (2016). Crystal structure of the GRAS domain of SCARECROW-LIKE 7 in Oryza sativa. Plant Cell. Advance Publication April 14, 2016; doi:10.1105/tpc.16.00018.

Shengping Li

Current Position: Research Assistant Professor, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Education: PhD: Crop Genetics and Breeding, Department of Crop Sciences, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, China.

Non-scientific Interests: Appliance repair, listening to music, watching 3D movies and cooking.

As I knew the 21st century to be the century of life science, I chose to study biological science at Hebei University. After graduation, I immediately began my graduate research with Dr. Weiren Wu working on functional studies of rice genes. I succeeded in cloning a rice gene regulating growth and development, ddf1, and preliminarily characterizing its roles. Since then, I realized life is wonderful and made a decision to be a plant biologist. Fortunately, with an opportunity to join Dr. Yunkun Wu's lab, I gradually became familiar with protein structure as a basis for revealing molecular mechanisms of proteins. Under Dr. Yunkun Wu's instruction, I actively pursued the structural and functional characterization of GRAS proteins, which are conserved among a large family with diverse important roles in plant growth and development. As a long-sought-after structure, I knew well how challenging the project should be, thus I put more efforts into my work and finally my effort paid off with the structure determined, showing how beautiful and miraculously the protein functions, like an delicate cellular machine.

Yanhe Zhao

Current Position: PhD student, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Education: B.S. (2011) in Agriculture at Huazhong Agricultural University, China.

Non-scientific Interests: Chatting, playing basketball and reading cosmology.

Born in a small village where wheat is the major food crop, I didn't realize the importance of rice until I read the story about hybrid rice in China. Being a junior at Huazhong Agricultural University, I enjoyed novel ideas such as "everything is the embodiment of the energy and the sun is the only source of energy for life on earth; it is a pity that animals do not have the ability to convert the sun's energy directly, but plants do..." After joining Prof. Yunkun Wu's lab as a graduate student at Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, I have had the opportunity to use X-ray crystallographic tools to reveal the structure and mechanism of proteins. Regarded as central to the "green revolution", GRAS proteins belong to large plant-specific protein family and play important roles in plant growth and development. However, the structural characterization of the conserved GRAS domain was unavailable. We are very excited to unravel the mysteries of the 3-dimensional structure of this highly conserved protein, which opens up a door for exploring more challenges.