The Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses (CPRES) is dedicated to fundamental research on how plants detect and respond to biotic and abiotic stresses in their environment. Research on biotic stresses includes the molecular mechanisms used by viruses, bacteria, fungi, and nematodes to incite disease and by plants to resist infection. Research on abiotic stresses includes molecular mechanisms by which plants resist such unfavorable conditions as drought, flooding, chilling, excess salts, toxic metals, and pollutants.

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CPRES Core Facility facilitates:  CPRES Scientist Adam Bogdanove says the services of the CPRES 4th Bessey Core Facility greatly helped his lab perform the cutting edge research that led to the Nature Methods Method of the Year for 2011.  After his group solved the DNA sequence recognition code of a protein from a bacterium that infects plants, researchers around the world have applied this knowledge to engineer genomes of many organisms.  This has had a major impact in biomedical research from cancer to stem cells.   Professor Bogdanove and collaborators at the University of Washington have started out 2012 with a paper in Science magazine on the beautiful structure of this protein bound to its target DNA sequence.   Congratulations to Adam and the Bogdanove lab! 

      BOGDANOVE’S RESEARCH NAMED 2011 METHOD OF THE YEAR

In the two and a half years since Adam Bogdanove, professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, along with Matthew Moscou, a former graduate student, discovered how a class of proteins find and bind specific sequences in plant genomes, researchers worldwide have moved fast to use this discovery. The research has been named the 2011 Method of the Year by the journal Nature Methods. More: http://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2012/jan/Bogdanove