Ellen Rim
@ellenrim.bsky.social
Crops x synthetic biology. Assistant Professor @Stanford ChemE. Long-term collaborator of @jimnotwell.bsky.social
Optimized glycosylation patterns to recapitulate arabidopsis FLS2-flagellin binding in yeast surface display 👏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Tuning Yeast Glycosylation Proximal to the FLS2-flg22 Binding Interface enables Functional Yeast Surface Display under Induced ER Stress
Pattern recognition receptors such as FLAGELLIN SENSING 2 (FLS2) are central to plant immunity and attractive targets for engineering broader detection of bacterial phytopathogens. However, evaluating...
www.biorxiv.org
November 27, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Optimized glycosylation patterns to recapitulate arabidopsis FLS2-flagellin binding in yeast surface display 👏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Save the american chestnut 🌰
Two-Year Field Trial of Genetically Engineered American Chestnut Reveals Greater Fungal Blight Tolerance Compared to Wild-Type Full-Sibling Trees https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.07.687213v1
November 10, 2025 at 4:12 AM
Save the american chestnut 🌰
Reposted by Ellen Rim
Plant synthetic biology faculty opening – come be my colleague! 🌱🧬
@universityofga.bsky.social Department of Plant Biology is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. Join UGA's growing plant synbio community!
@universityofga.bsky.social Department of Plant Biology is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. Join UGA's growing plant synbio community!
We're hiring! Please spread the word. We have an opening for an Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. See ad for details – and apply to join us here in Athens, GA! 🪴 #PlantBiology #SyntheticBiology #PlantScience #AcademicJobs #UGA
October 16, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Plant synthetic biology faculty opening – come be my colleague! 🌱🧬
@universityofga.bsky.social Department of Plant Biology is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. Join UGA's growing plant synbio community!
@universityofga.bsky.social Department of Plant Biology is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. Join UGA's growing plant synbio community!
Reading this 👀 new tool for in vivo plant protein selection www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Engineered geminivirus replicons enable rapid in planta directed evolution
Directed evolution can rapidly generate genetic variants with new and enhanced properties, yet efficient platforms for performing such evolution directly in plant cells have been lacking. We developed...
www.science.org
October 3, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Reading this 👀 new tool for in vivo plant protein selection www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Really excited to join Stanford ChemE this September! We'll engineer proteins in plant immune and hormone pathways, combining high-throughput directed evolution with ML. Our goal is to enhance climate stress resilience and disease resistance in crops: rim.stanford.edu
Harnessing synthetic biology to engineer resilient crops
rim.stanford.edu
August 20, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Really excited to join Stanford ChemE this September! We'll engineer proteins in plant immune and hormone pathways, combining high-throughput directed evolution with ML. Our goal is to enhance climate stress resilience and disease resistance in crops: rim.stanford.edu
Found last season's EquiSciTrack series helpful for the job search!
July 8, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Found last season's EquiSciTrack series helpful for the job search!
Studying wild resistant varieties -> basic biology -> a solution to a devastating disease in citrus. Pretty amazing
I had fun collaborating about conceptualization susceptibility loci and evolution constraining downstream ability to evolve new resistances. Really need to better understand gene, network and species extinction in plant lineages.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Targeted MYC2 stabilization confers citrus Huanglongbing resistance
Huanglongbing (HLB) is a devastating citrus disease. In this work, we report an HLB resistance regulatory circuit in Citrus composed of an E3 ubiquitin ligase, PUB21, and its substrate, the MYC2 trans...
www.science.org
April 26, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Studying wild resistant varieties -> basic biology -> a solution to a devastating disease in citrus. Pretty amazing
Reposted by Ellen Rim
🌱From Nature Genetics: RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase protein, directly binds and phosphorylates a fungal effector to trigger defense - highlighting TKPs as effector sensors. (Yi-Chang Sung, Suji Baik, Gitta Coaker)
▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Wheat tandem kinase RWT4 directly binds a fungal effector to activate defense - Nature Genetics
This study shows that RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase, confers resistance to the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae by directly binding to the pathogen effector AvrPWT4 and activating host defense.
www.nature.com
April 18, 2025 at 4:21 PM
🌱From Nature Genetics: RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase protein, directly binds and phosphorylates a fungal effector to trigger defense - highlighting TKPs as effector sensors. (Yi-Chang Sung, Suji Baik, Gitta Coaker)
▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Toddler and i enjoy the same book somehow
April 18, 2025 at 4:20 AM
Toddler and i enjoy the same book somehow
I've also been thinking about this: "Why Are There So Few Commercially Successful Crop Varieties Engineered for Disease Resistance?"
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
It‘s Complicated: Why Are There So Few Commercially Successful Crop Varieties Engineered for Disease Resistance?
It is more than 40 years since the era of transgenic plants began and more than 30 years after the cloning of the first plant disease resistance genes. Despite extensive progress in our mechanistic u....
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
April 5, 2025 at 11:30 PM
I've also been thinking about this: "Why Are There So Few Commercially Successful Crop Varieties Engineered for Disease Resistance?"
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Reposted by Ellen Rim
If you are a #WNT lover (who is not?) you cannot miss the incoming Grodon Research Conference
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
and the preceeding GRSeminar
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
a unique forum for younger scientists to present their work
👉 Please help me spread the word and RT (or RB?)!🙏
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
and the preceeding GRSeminar
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
a unique forum for younger scientists to present their work
👉 Please help me spread the word and RT (or RB?)!🙏
2025 Wnt Signaling Conference GRC
The 2025 Gordon Research Conference on Wnt Signaling will be held in Lewiston, Maine. Apply today to reserve your spot.
www.grc.org
March 20, 2025 at 7:40 AM
If you are a #WNT lover (who is not?) you cannot miss the incoming Grodon Research Conference
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
and the preceeding GRSeminar
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
a unique forum for younger scientists to present their work
👉 Please help me spread the word and RT (or RB?)!🙏
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
and the preceeding GRSeminar
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
a unique forum for younger scientists to present their work
👉 Please help me spread the word and RT (or RB?)!🙏
Former USDA employee (and a UC Davis colleague) terminated days before her due date: "We wouldn't have food without our farmers. A lot of us working for the USDA, that's what we do, we support American farmers"
abcnews.go.com/Politics/vid...
abcnews.go.com/Politics/vid...
Video Former USDA employee terminated days before her due date
Justine Beaulieu was impacted by the Trump layoffs days before she was due to give birth, losing her maternity leave and her health insurance in limbo.
abcnews.go.com
February 21, 2025 at 4:58 AM
Former USDA employee (and a UC Davis colleague) terminated days before her due date: "We wouldn't have food without our farmers. A lot of us working for the USDA, that's what we do, we support American farmers"
abcnews.go.com/Politics/vid...
abcnews.go.com/Politics/vid...
Reposted by Ellen Rim
We're celebrating our 10th anniversary this year and remembering some great moments from the past decade! In February 2022, IGI's Pam Ronald won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her “pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice.”
Read more: ow.ly/kAqe50UPW9s
Read more: ow.ly/kAqe50UPW9s
February 19, 2025 at 6:03 PM
We're celebrating our 10th anniversary this year and remembering some great moments from the past decade! In February 2022, IGI's Pam Ronald won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her “pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice.”
Read more: ow.ly/kAqe50UPW9s
Read more: ow.ly/kAqe50UPW9s
A tour de force starting with C. elegans juice that identified a nematode peptide MAMP-plant immune receptor pair
Excited to share our new publication on a novel MAMP peptide conserved across nematodes, insects, and fungal pathogens, along with the RLK essential for its signaling. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A trehalase-derived MAMP triggers LecRK-V-mediated immune responses in Arabidopsis
Plant-parasitic nematodes (PPNs) cause major agricultural losses worldwide, yet the molecular basis of plant immunity against these pathogens remains poorly understood. To investigate how plants recog...
www.biorxiv.org
February 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
A tour de force starting with C. elegans juice that identified a nematode peptide MAMP-plant immune receptor pair
Reposted by Ellen Rim
I'm very excited to share my first graduate research project! Check out our preprint which describes how data generated with directed evolution can be used to model the phenotypic effects of naturally-evolved sequence variants. (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Combining Directed Evolution with Machine Learning Enables Accurate Genotype-to-Phenotype Predictions
Linking sequence variation to phenotypic effects is critical for efficient exploitation of large genomic datasets. Here we present a novel approach combining directed evolution with protein language m...
www.biorxiv.org
January 29, 2025 at 10:23 PM
I'm very excited to share my first graduate research project! Check out our preprint which describes how data generated with directed evolution can be used to model the phenotypic effects of naturally-evolved sequence variants. (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
This is wild. A fungal pathogen-secreted molecule can transdifferentiate bundle sheath into xylem, increasing water content of plant host under drought stress.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A single pathogen-secreted protein reprograms plants for drought resilience
Climate change-enforced drought stress conditions and diseases caused by pathogens often co-occur and represent one of the greatest challenges in plant science. Wilt pathogens that colonize water-cond...
www.biorxiv.org
January 14, 2025 at 6:31 PM
This is wild. A fungal pathogen-secreted molecule can transdifferentiate bundle sheath into xylem, increasing water content of plant host under drought stress.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Review of CRISPR-edited crops - personal favorite is non-browning avocados!
Seedless berries, avocados that don't go brown, cows with a genetic haircut, and more – learn about how CRISPR 🧬 is being used in plant 🌾 & animal 🐮 agriculture in our reader-friendly review, written by IGI's Tonio Chaparro! Read here: ow.ly/KLMJ50UpjA7
December 23, 2024 at 11:51 PM
Review of CRISPR-edited crops - personal favorite is non-browning avocados!
Reposted by Ellen Rim
In her second paper Flor and team (collaboration with Lingdong Shi and Jill Banfield) showed that reduced methane emissions in transgenic rice genotypes are associated with altered rhizosphere microbial hydrogen cycling. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org
November 27, 2024 at 10:52 PM
In her second paper Flor and team (collaboration with Lingdong Shi and Jill Banfield) showed that reduced methane emissions in transgenic rice genotypes are associated with altered rhizosphere microbial hydrogen cycling. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Ellen Rim
Flor and team also have two new papers! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Tyrosine-sulfated peptide hormone induces flavonol biosynthesis to control elongation and differentiation in Arabidopsis primary root
In Arabidopsis roots, growth initiation and cessation are organized into distinct zones. How regulatory mechanisms are integrated to coordinate these processes and maintain proper growth progression o...
www.biorxiv.org
November 27, 2024 at 10:49 PM
Flor and team also have two new papers! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Ellen Rim
Kudos to Ellen Rim and team on their fantastic new paper describing a HTP approach for generating new immune specificities. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Directed evolution of a plant immune receptor for broad spectrum recognition of pathogen effectors
Rapid development of immune receptors that protect crops from emerging pathogens is a paramount goal. We applied high throughput directed evolution to the ligand binding domain of the rice immune rece...
www.biorxiv.org
November 27, 2024 at 10:47 PM
Kudos to Ellen Rim and team on their fantastic new paper describing a HTP approach for generating new immune specificities. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...