Abby Bryson and Leah Johnson awarded inaugural MPS Outstanding Paper Award
This October, two students in the Molecular Plant Sciences graduate program were awarded the inaugural MPS Outstanding Paper Award. This award was established to recognize the incredible work MPS students have done, and their accomplishments in publishing research.
The two students, Abby Bryson and Leah Johnson, were granted their awards during a seminar on October 21, along with a certificate and monetary prize.
“Abby and Leah are highly deserving of this award,” said Jianping Hu, director of MPS. “We have well over 50 graduate students in the MPS program, many of whom are conducting exciting work and publishing in impactful journals. We hope to develop this award into a tradition of MPS to encourage our students to aim for research excellence.”
Abby Bryson
Abby Bryson is a student in the Genetics & Genome Sciences Program and the MPS program. She is mentored by Bjoern Hamberger and recently defended her thesis.
By Kara Headley
Bryson is being recognized for her work on a paper in Nature Communications, Uncovering a miltiradiene biosynthetic gene cluster in the Lamiaceae reveals a dynamic evolutionary trajectory, which was published in January 2023.
This paper identified a large biosynthetic genome cluster, or BGC – a group of genes located closely together and involved in the same metabolic pathways. Variations of the BGC were found in several species within the mint family. Having a better understanding of these BGCs give researchers insight into how plants evolve.
“This award is very meaningful to me because this is my first chapter and really the first time I saw the work through every step of the process,” Bryson said. “I am very proud of what my co-authors and I were able to accomplish, and I am thankful that MPS chose my paper. I love being part of a program with such amazing people.”
Read more about the paper in MSUToday.
Leah Johnson
Leah Johnson graduated from Michigan State University in 2022 with her Ph.D. in Cell & Molecular Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences. Johnson was mentored by Gregg Howe. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.
By Victor Di Rita
Johnson is being recognized for her work on the paper Diversification of JAZ-MYC signaling function in immune metabolism, published in New Phytologist in July 2023.
This study looks at how plants respond to environmental threats in the correct way. In plants, the jasmonate signaling pathway helps plants control their defense responses to environmental stresses. This paper showed that different JAZ subsets control different stress responses.
“I’m very thankful to the committee for selecting this work as one of the outstanding papers of the year,” Johnson said. “This paper was the culmination of a lot of hard work by all of the authors, so it means a lot to have that hard work recognized! I am particularly grateful to have worked with Gregg and my co-author Ian on this story - they are excellent scientists, writers and mentors and I learned so much about the research and writing process from them.”
Read more about this paper in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory’s newsroom.
