Epidermal Phytochrome B Inhibits Hypocotyl Negative Gravitropism Non-Cell-Autonomously
Author Profile
Jaewook Kim, Kijong Song, and Eunae Park
Highlighted Paper: Kim, Song, Park et al et al. (2016). Epidermal Phytochrome B Inhibits Hypocotyl Negative Gravitropism Non-Cell Autonomously. Plant Cell. Advance Publication October 6, 2016; doi:10.1105/tpc.16.00487.
Jaewook Kim
Current Position: Graduate student, Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST, Korea.
Education: B.Sc. (2011), Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST.
Non-scientific Interests: Cooking, weight-training.
As a graduate student in Giltsu Choi's lab in the Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST, I wanted to study how phytochromes inhibit hypocotyl negative gravitropism. When I joined the lab, Keunhwa Kim, a graduate student in the lab, had just published a paper showing PIFs inhibit hypocotyl negative gravitropism in the endodermis. My colleagues and I read the paper many times and decided to determine in which tissues phyB works. Fortunately, tissue-specific phyB lines had been already generated using many different promoters in the lab; thus, my colleagues and I were able to start the project immediately. The first things we had to do was determining which tissue-specific lines were really tissue-specific lines. After going through many ups and downs, we were able to show that epidermal phyB inhibits hypocotyl negative gravitropism non-cell autonomously. After graduation, I would like to go abroad as a postdoctoral researcher and want to discover noble aspects of light signaling.
Kijong Song
Current Position: Graduate student, Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST, Korea.
Education: B.Sc. (2014), Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST.
Non-scientific Interests: Swimming, climbing.
When I was young, I used to visit my grandparents' house in the countryside and spent most of weekend time playing in the yard. Insects and flowers were abundant. They were pure joys to watch, filling my mind with wonder and awe. In the college, I took a plant biology class taught by Prof. Giltsu Choi and learned how plants recognize their surroundings with photoreceptors. It re-awoke my childhood wonder in my grandparents? yard and made me enter graduate school. As a graduate student, I'm trying to figure out how phytochromes work inside plants to regulate various light responses including seedling photomorphogenesis and hypocotyl negative gravitropism. I'm especially fascinated by non-cell autonomous function of phytochromes.
Eunae Park
Current Position: Post-Doc, Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST.
Education: Ph.D (2010), Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST.
Non-scientific Interests: Traveling, being a good mom.
Since a graduate school, I have been studying how phytochromes inhibit PIFs in Giltsu Choi's lab at the Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST. I discovered that phytochromes inhibit PIFs both by degrading PIF proteins and dissociating PIFs from their target promoters. In this paper, my colleagues and I found that epidermal phytochrome B (phyB) promote light responses by inhibiting PIFs non-cell autonomously. Very surprisingly, we found that phyB promotes the degradation of PIFs even when phyB and PIFs are spatially separated in epidermis and endodermis, respectively. I?m currently investigating how epidermal phyB degrades endodermal PIFs non-cell autonomously.