Students recognized with MPS Outstanding Paper Award

The Molecular Plant Sciences graduate program celebrates the successes of its students every year with the MPS Outstanding Paper Award. This award was established to recognize the incredible work MPS students or alumnus have done, and their accomplishments in publishing research within the last year.

The two former students, Xiaotong Jiang and Febri Susanto, were granted their awards during a seminar on September 29, along with a certificate and monetary prize.

"This is the second year for this MPS award, which aims to recognize the outstanding research conducted by our students,” said Jianping Hu, director of MPS. “Both Xiaotong and Febri are highly deserving of this award, as their publications are of high quality and exert strong impacts on plant science."

Xiaotong Jiang

Xiaotong Jiang was a Ph.D. student in Jianping Hu’s lab and graduated with her Ph.D. in Plant Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences in Fall 2024. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Hu lab.

Jiang is being recognized for her work on a paper published in Nature Communications, A cytosolic glyoxylate shunt complements the canonical photorespiratory pathway in Arabidopsis, which was published in April 2025.

The paper identifies a new pathway that complements the main workflow of photorespiration, aiding in processing cytotoxins. This parallel pathway may have a lot of potential for improving energy efficiency and crop yield without compromising their resilience to stress conditions.

On receiving this award, Jiang said, “It’s very meaningful to me because it recognizes not just the research itself, but also the effort, challenges and growth I’ve experienced throughout my Ph.D.”

Read more about this research at the College of Natural Science.

Febri Susanto

Febri Susanto graduated with his Ph.D. in Spring 2025 in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences. He was mentored by Peter Lundquist and is currently a postdoc in the Lundquist lab.

Susanto is being recognized for his paper on The Plant Cell, Cyanoglobule lipid droplets are a stress-responsive metabolic compartment of cyanobacteria and the progenitor of plant plastoglobules. This paper was published in July 2025 and is part of Susanto’s dissertation work.

The paper describes a long-overlooked organelle in cyanobacteria named cyanoglobules, which are tiny lipid droplets that store and remodel lipids under stress conditions. The team discovered that these structures are remarkably similar to plastoglobules in plant chloroplasts, suggesting that cyanoglobules are the ancient ancestors of plastoglobules. The work shows that these lipid droplets are not passive storage sites, but dynamic compartments that help cells adapt to environmental stress.

“This award is a meaningful recognition of my and my team’s hard work and dedication to advancing plant and cyanobacterial biology,” said Susanto. “I am deeply honored and grateful that my research is being recognized for its contribution to understanding how photosynthetic organisms manage stress and energy at the cellular level.”