People

Anton Lang Memorial Award

2008 Winners

Leron Katsir, Graduate Student

Kinya Nomura, Postdoctoral Research Associate

Leron Katsir chose the Howe lab as a home base because Gregg was working on a family of plant cytochrome P450s that participate in the biosynthesis of the plant hormone jasmonate (JA), a topic related to his undergraduate work at Florida State. Rather than choosing a more traditional thesis project, though, Leron wanted to tackle a major unsolved question in plant biology. He decided early on that he wanted to identify the JA receptor, a goal that had long eluded researchers around the world. In a wonderful combination of collaboration and building on the research efforts of others, Leron ultimately played a major role in solving the mystery of how JA works (Thines et al., 2007). A paper describing his contribution and providing the first description of a JA receptor is soon to be published in PNAS. Throughout his career in Gregg’s lab, Leron has frequently made important contributions to projects of fellow lab members. He is a model citizen in the lab, supervising rotation students, new graduate students, and undergraduate assistants. He is generous with his time, serving on department committees, hosting and interacting with seminar speakers, and helping to recruit graduate students. In all aspects, Leron has been an asset to the Howe lab and the PRL. Given his ability to ask important questions and tenaciously go after the answers, we anticipate exciting contributions to the field of plant biology in the future. Leron is most deserving of this Anton Lang Award for Outstanding Research.

Kinya Nomura has spent the past seven years in Sheng Yang He’s lab studying the host targets of bacterial virulence proteins that promote disease susceptibility in plants. This, too, is a historically difficult problem, and Sheng Yang accepted the likelihood that going in pursuit of such a goal would mean very few publications for several years. Kinya believed that the potential payback was substantial, well worth the risk. Surprisingly, he has managed to author and co-author ten publications during this time. His tour de force has been the identification of the host target for an important effector protein in the plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000. In an article published in Science, Kinya described the mechanisms by which a bacterial pathogen subverts host innate immunity and causes infection in plants. At the same time, he has contributed to several other projects in the lab: making key constructs for type III translocation experiments, providing daily supervision for a graduate student’s research on the Hrp pilus, providing results for figures in other’s publications, and making yeast two-hybrid constructs for the collaborative JAZ project between the He, Howe, and Browse labs. Kinya’s research skills are immaculate: without fail, he writes out every step in advance of performing a DNA restriction digestion. Kinya Nomura clearly embodies the qualities of research excellence that qualify him for the Anton Lang Award for Research Excellence.

Anton Lang Memorial Awards & Lecturers