News
Article wins Tansley Medal
April 2010
Our review article recently published in New Phytologist has won the Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science.
Editor-in-Chief Prof. Ian Woodward and Tansley review Editor Prof. Alistair Hetherington from New Phytologist write: "This year we are delighted to award the first Tansley Medal to Steven Spoel from the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK, for his paper on Post-translational protein modification as a tool for transcription reprogramming (this issue, pp. 333–339). As the title suggests, the manuscript deals with the control of transcriptional reprogramming. This process contributes to, for example, the co-ordinated changes in gene expression that occur during development or during adaptation to environmental stress. Spoel and his co-authors focus on the contribution that protein modification makes to the control of transcriptional reprogramming. In a lucid and highly accessible account they discuss how the activation and repression of genes can be achieved by phosphorylation, ubiquitinylation, S-nitrosylation and disulphide-bonding of transcriptional activators, co-activators and repressor proteins. The Minireview provides examples of how these processes operate and their significance in relatively well understood systems such as yeast. However, the main focus is on the plant immune response and especially on how modification of the immune co-activator protein NPR1 can control its localization and abundance in plant cells. The result is a highly authoritative review of an emerging topic of fundamental importance to our understanding of plant cell biology."
