Happy Wednesday, Hippies! Marian Dioguardi (American, born 1954) "Shiny and Bright Morning," 2024 oil on aluminum panel, 24" × 24"

(4/11) Furthermore, we pinpointed the cell division plane defect due to the aberrant phragmoplast morphology.

(1/11) Excited to share the brand-new cell division preprint from the lab! In this manuscript, chemical biology (in a collaboration with @rnett42.bsky.social Ryan’s lab) meets the cell biology (our lab). Harmala alkaloids regulate cell division planes in plants www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Kamryn @kamdiehl.bsky.social talked about her cell division plane determination work and showed some cool movies. Great job, Kamryn 🍀🔬👏

It was annual @ubcbotany.bsky.social sympodium today. We had 2 talks and 4 poster presentations from the lab folks. Thanks everyone for your hard work and dedication. We are grateful to the organizers and the department. A day full of fantastic talks and exciting poster sessions.

Cell cycle follows 'pause and play; mechanism in salt and cold stress recovery in diverse plant species Hazelwood et al. @ohazel.bsky.social @kamdiehl.bsky.social @aribidopsis.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🔬🌽 Julia @juliazheku.bsky.social made some microscopic slides for @kamdiehl.bsky.social Kamryn's TA class (BIOL 200 | Cell Biology). The goal is to push some plant cell biology samples as a teaching tool. Corn 🌽 root cross section under the scope.

Introducing @kamdiehl.bsky.social Kamryn as a new graduate student in the lab Kamryn did her undergrad at UBC in a combined major in physics, computer science, and biology, and did her MSc with Geoff Wasteneys working on plant cell biology Welcome to the gang! www.ashraflab.com/team.html

Recent update: An incredible video captured by Kamryn @kamdiehl.bsky.social You will see what happens to the cell with GLOOP (gentle lysis of obstructive protoplasm) solution incubation.

Microtubule plus-end dynamics are tightly coupled to the turnover of the MOR1 polymerase https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.30.621176v1

(10/17) We tested that by treating CDKA;1-mVenus with Olomoucine. The CDKA;1-mVenus signal goes down with Olomoucine treatment and reverts back during the recovery. This suggests Olomoucine blocks CDKA;1 reversibly.

(9/17) Kamryn tested Olomoucine (Red) binding (yellow) with CDKA;1 (cyan). She found that Olomoucine occupies the same binding site of ATP. As ATP binds reversibly, we hypothesized Olomoucine may act reversibly too.

(8/17) Kamryn ran a molecular dynamics simulation and showed that ATP (Magenta) binds (yellow) with CDKA;1 (cyan). This known interaction confirms that we had a good AlphaFold-based 3D structure of CDKA1 and molecular dynamic simulation pipeline established.

(7/17) Among these, CDKA1 controls both G1 to S and G2 to M transitions. But, loss of function of CDKA1 causes the male gametophyte lethality. So, we used a chemical, Olomoucine, approach to block CDKA1.

(4/17) That was exciting! Olivia went ahead to test stress recovery for salt, osmotic, cold, and heat. We ended up with a massive dataset and got lost in quantification. 41,913 cells counted!!!

(1/17) We are excited to share the Ashraf and Gallagher labs collaboration on cell cycle regulation during environmental stress recovery in Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, and ryegrass.

Cell cycle follows pause and play mechanism in environment stress recovery in diverse plant species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646900v1