Congratulations to Professor Jason Stajich on his election as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science! From the AAAS Site: Jason E. Stajich University of California, Riverside: For distinguished contributions at the interface of computational, genomic and evolutionary biology, using integrative approaches to study how fungi and other microorganisms evolve.

Congratulations to Associate Professor Caroline Roper, who is PI on a new 5-year $10M US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture ECDRE grant! Professor Jason Stajich from our department is Co-PI. Other investigators from UCR include Danelle Seymour, Philippe Rolshausen and Ashraf el-Kereamy (Lindcove). The start date of the grant is 9/1/2020.

From the Article: "UC Riverside’s “homemade” COVID-19 testing lab has drawn widespread attention from Southern California media. The acknowledgment of the new lab’s success comes at a time when some universities across the nation have struggled to prevent campus outbreaks. The lab – created by UCR faculty – places the university in the elite company...

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Ansel Hsiao, who is PI on a $3.9M National Institutes of Health RO1 grant entitled "Vibrio cholerae antinitrosative stress defenses and gut microbiome interaction" that was just awarded. Dr. Hsiao will receive $1.3 million over the next 5 years as PI.

Organic food sales topped $50 billion in the United States in 2018. Statistics from the Organic Trade Association tell part of the story of this growing market: Fruits, vegetables and other specialty crops combined to make up 36.3% of total organic sales up 5.6% from the previous year. Naturally, farmers want to meet consumer demand...

Congratulations to Professor Hailing Jin who is the sole PI on 2 recent grant awards! Dr. Jin received a prestigious 5-year Maximizing Investigators Research Award (MIRA R35) from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) for more than $377k/year, ~1.89M total. The grant is titled"Cross-kingdom RNA communications between plant and fungal pathogens." Dr. Jin also received...

Congratulations to Dr. Patricia Manosalva, Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology and Director of the Avocado Rootstock Breeding Program, who is the principal investigator on a new $4.4M grant from the USDA/NIFA Specialty Crop Research Initiative. The grant is titled "Reducing avocado losses to major challenges by improving resistance selection and...

Dr. Juliet Morrison, Assistant Professor of Virology was quoted in the New York Times on Saturday, August 29, 2020. Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

Congratulations to Dr. Katherine Borkovich, Dr. Rong Hai, and Dr. Juliet Morrison from the Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, and Dr. Isgouhi Kaloshian, Department of Nematology, and Matthew Collin from the Institute for Integrative Genomic Biology Genomics Core for all of their hard work and dedication to get UCR's COVID-19 testing lab to open...

Congratulations are in order for Associate Professor Emma Aronson! Her grant, one of 10 projects in the new National Science Foundation Critical Zone Cluster Network, has been selected for funding. Her project is the sole microbiology-focused project in the entire network, and is called "Geomicrobiology and Biogeochemistry in the Critical Zone." The total award is...

From the UCR News Article by Iqbal Pitalwala: "A research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has outlined how the Zika virus, which constituted an epidemic threat in 2016, suppresses the immune system of its host. The Zika virus, or ZIKV, spreads through mosquito bites and sexual intercourse. Currently, no approved...

From the UCR News Article by Jules Bernstein: "Scientists are closer to gaining the upper hand on a disease that has wiped out citrus orchards across the globe. New models of the bacterium linked to the disease reveal control methods that were previously unavailable. Metabolic models of organisms are like road maps of cities. “They...

Congratulations to Dr. Hailing Jin on this discovery that will help control Citrus Green Disease. From the UCR News Article: "The new treatment effectively kills the bacterium causing the disease with a naturally occurring molecule found in wild citrus relatives. This molecule, an antimicrobial peptide, offers numerous advantages over the antibiotics currently used to treat...

Congratulations are in order to Dr. Alex Putman, who is a Co-PI on a $10M grant from the United Stated Department of Agriculture focused on developing artificial intelligence for sustainable agriculture! You can read the UCR News Article titled "UCR wins $10 Million to develop AI for sustainable agriculture" here: https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2020/06/22/ucr-wins-10-million-develop-ai-sustainable-agriculture Dr. Putman will be...

Dr. Hailing Jin and her group are featured in an "Outlook" piece just published in Nature. The story focused on how her group is developing sprays consisting of extracellular vesicles containing RNA to silence genes in fungal pathogens of crops. Read the piece on the Nature site here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01771-1

Congratulations are in order for Dr. Ansel Hsiao, who is the corresponding author on a paper just published in Cell! "Interpersonal gut microbiome variation drives susceptibility and resistance to cholera infection". Other authors of the paper include Hsiao lab members: Salma Alavi, Jonathan D. Mitchell, Jennifer Y. Cho, Rui Liu, and John C. Macbeth. The...

The Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology joins in solidarity with our Black community of students, staff, and colleagues to strongly condemn racism. As a department, we pledge to continue our work implementing policies aimed at advancing diversity, equality, inclusion, and justice in our community by: 1) Immediately forming a Committee for Diversity and Inclusion...

Dr. Sydney Glassman's Op-Ed "Gov. Newsom must make a priority of funding our UCs" was published in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise. You can read the article at the following link. https://www.pe.com/2020/06/10/gov-newsom-must-make-a-priority-of-funding-our-ucs/

Congratulations to Dr. Rao, who has co-authored a paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) focused on the structure of the multipartite Brome Mosaic Virus (BMV)! Graduate student Antara Chakravarty was also an author on the study. You can read the paper at the following PNAS website link: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/20/10673.short?rss=1 The UCR press...

Congratulations to Dr. Hailing Jin Professor in the department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology on being elected a Fellow of the AAM (American Academy of Microbiology). From the AAM website: "Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group within the ASM, are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on...