Joe Covi, Yelena Chernyavskaya, Craig Judd, Sere Williams, and Drew Iman visited four high school classrooms at Fort Collins High School and Rocky Mountain High School as part of the PhUn Week program sponsored by the American Physiological Society. The PhUn Week program is intended to stimulate an early interest in Physiology by bringing researchers into K-12 classrooms.

Undergraduate Jenni Sneden of the Garrity lab won the Undergraduate Best Poster Award at the Front Range Neuroscience Group Annual Meeting held December 8. Congratulations!

Professor A.S.N. Reddy was appointed to the Editorial Board of The Open Plant Science Journal

Undergraduate Ashley Denney in Pat Bedinger's lab received a WINS Travel award to present her data at the ASPB meeting this summer in Honolulu. Congratulations!

Sung-Bong Shin successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in November. Congratulations to Sung-Bong Shin and his advisor Professor A.S.N. Reddy.

Undergraduate Jessica Borden (Mueller lab) completed her Senior Honors Thesis. Congratulations, Jessica!

The Reddy Lab welcomes Dr. Giridara-Kumar Surabhi from Kansas State University as our new Postdoctoral Research Associate.

The NSF-IOS program has decided to award a $250 K Grant over two years to Associate Prof. Marinus Pilon for research on "Copper Delivery for Photosynthesis in Plants".

Dhruba Naug was awarded a Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Post-doc Rachel Schwartz (Mueller lab) convinced her parents to go salamander collecting with her on their Thanksgiving holiday in WA.

Professor Daniel Bush visited the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines to give a seminar and work with collaborators on a rice research project. He also gave a seminar at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan before reviewing the research programs in the Institute of Molecular Biology at the Sinica.

Chris Mayack and Dhruba Naug spent a week in Arizona State University, learning new techniques, doing experiments and forging future collaborations.

Steve Stack attended the 17th Plant and Animal Genome Conference January 10-14, 2009 in San Diego, where he presented an a poster and an invited talk at the Evolution of Genome Size Workshop titled "Cytogenetic Characterization of Species Hybrids in the Tomato Clade" (Paul Covy and Pat Bedinger coauthors). Steve also gave a talk at the tomato genome sequencing meeting titled "The Role of Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH)in sequencing the Tomato Genome."

Lorrie Anderson attended the 17th Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego (Jan. 10-14)and organized the Plant Cytogenetics Workshop where six speakers from four different countries made oral presentations.

Dr. Greg Florant and students, Ashley Fenn, Jessica Healy,Nicole Prentice, and Robert Schorr attended the SICB meetings on January 3-7,2009 in Boston, MA. Jessica Healy and Robert Schorr gave talks on their work and Ashley and Nicole presented posters.

Dr. Gregory Florant was a lecturer in the American Physiological Society Professional Skills workshop in Orlando, Florida from Jan. 14-17th.

Simmons, M. P. 2008. Potential use of host-derived genome signatures to root virus phylogenies. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 49: 969-978.

A paper by Salah E. Abdel-Ghany, a former Post-doc in M. Pilon's lab, was accepted for publication in Planta. Title: Contribution of plastocyanin isoforms to photosynthesis and copper homeostasis in Arabidopsis thaliana grown at different copper regimes.

Special Assistant Professor Gul Shad Ali , Professor A.S.N. Reddy and collaborators from Washington State University published a paper (Title: Ca2+/calmodulin regulates salicylic acid-mediated plant immunity) in Nature.

Professor Pat Bedinger met with students from Liberty Commons to consult with them about a science fair project on the genetic modification of pine beetles