Congratulations to Ashley Galant, a Plant Biology graduate student in the Jez lab, who was named as a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow in Biomedical Sciences. For her thesis, Ashley is studying how environmental and cellular changes alter protein function in plants. This project began with her crystallographic studies on the three-dimensional structure of homo-glutathione synthetase, an enzyme required for the synthesis of a critical redox buffer in soybean. More recently, she has used a redox-proteomics to examine how environmental pollution (i.e., ozone) effects proteins in soybean. Understanding how soybean remodels its redox-sensitive pathways in response to elevated ozone levels, which reduce seed yield, will provide information about how to target the engineering of ozone protection systems in this economically important crop.
