Abstract
Cryptochromes (CRYs) are evolutionarily conserved photoreceptors that mediate blue light regulation of growth and development in plants and the circadian clock in plants and animals, including human. Land plants possess two types of CRYs, CRY1 and CRY2, which serve overlapping and partially redundant functions in different plant species. CRYs exist as physiologically inactive monomers in the dark, which undergo homodimerization to increase their affinity to the CRY-interacting transcription or post-transcriptional regulators that modulate light-responsive transcriptome, epitranscriptome, and proteome to affect plant growth and development. Photoexcited CRYs also exhibit increased affinity to the CRY-regulatory proteins, which act to alter the activity, modification, or abundance of CRYs to modulate the photosensitivity of plants in response to the changing light environment. Recent researches in the field of CRY signal transduction will be discussed.
About the speaker
Prof Chentao Lin received his BS in Agronomy from South China College of Tropical Crops in 1982, his MS in Botany from Iowa State University in 1987 and his PhD in Genetics from Michigan State University in 1992. He then started his research work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, he joined the University of California at Los Angeles as Assistant Professor. He is currently the Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology.
Prof Lin’s research interests are photoreceptors and light regulation of plant development. He has been a member of the editorial boards of Molecular Plant and the Journal of Genetics and Genomics. He was also the monitoring editor of Plant Physiology and Associate Editor of Photochemistry & Photobiology.
Prof Lin is the fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also holds memberships at American Society of Plant Biologists and International Society of Plant Molecular Biology. Besides, he has received the US National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health (1994).
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