Achievement

Tenai Eguen is using proteomics to study early signaling events in plants in response to pathogen infection. She is studying these proteins on a total proteome, phosphoproteome and redoxome level. This involves protein purification, enrichment of phosphoproteins and redox proteins using metal oxides columns and thioredoxin affinity column respectively and protein identification by mass spectrometry. Several of the proteins that she has observed are known to play important roles in jasmonic acid signaling, stress tolerance, hypersensitive response, reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling, or cell death. Tenai identified proteins with new roles in defense based on enhanced disease susceptibility phenotypes. Tenai’s research also involves studying the role of plant histone demethylase REF6 (RELATIVE OF EARLY FLOWERING 6) in plant defense and in other hormone signaling pathways. Tenai presented her results at the several conferences and the IGERT Symposium in December 2012.