Identification of a Chlorophyll Dephytylase Involved in Chlorophyll Turnover in Arabidopsis

Author Profile

Yao-Pin Lin

Highlighted Paper: Lin et al. (2016). Identification of Chlorophyll Dephytylase Involved in Chlorophyll Turnover in Arabidopsis. Plant Cell. Advance Publication December 5, 2016; doi:10.1105/tpc.16.00478.

Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow in Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Education: PhD: TIGP-MBAS, Graduate Institute of Biotechnology, National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), Taiwan.

Non-scientific Interests: Hiking and watching movies.

After obtaining a B.S. degree in Botany at NCHU, I started my journey in plant research by joining Dr. Bor-yaw Lin's lab as an M.S. student at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the same school. In his lab, I learned cytogenetics by working on the propagation of maize multiple-mutants, observation of B chromosomes, and molecular biological assays. After graduation, I spent a couple of years serving as a teaching assistant in a Genetics class at the same institute and helped to handle administrative affairs. To continue to pursue my interest in plant research, I joined the Ph.D. program in Molecular and Biological Agricultural Sciences (Taiwan International Graduate Program) co-operated by Academia Sinica and NCHU. The major focus of my mentor's lab is to understand how plants protect themselves against different heat stress conditions. I was given a project characterizing Arabidopsis mutants with defects in plant thermotolerance and cloning of the responsible genes. Fortunately, it became clear that my previous training in maize genetics made my life easier in mapping and cloning of the CLD1 gene, which, we later showed, encodes a long-sought enzyme that removes the phytol chain from chlorophyll during its turnover. I am very happy that the paper will be published in the same month of my wedding.