Spring 2023​

• Mac Flanagan wins the ASPB SURF summer fellowship! 🎉🎈

• Lars Kruse (ex-postdoc) is awarded the 2023 Plant Journal Early Career Award by the Phytochemical Society of North America! 🎉🎈

• Gaurav is awarded the 2023 Arthur Neish Young Investigator Award by PSNA! 🎉🎈

• Four papers published in Current Opinions in Plant Biology (Gaurav, Bhaswati, Irfan), Genome Biology and Evolution (Arielle)​, The Plant Journal (Liz), Frontiers in Plant Sciences (Gaurav, Lars) 🎉🎈

• Gaurav speaks at the grad-student organized University of Missouri Plant Science symposium sponsored by Corteva Agrosciences. Thank you for the invitation!

• Our project on identifying the biosynthetic pathway of resin glycosides in sweet potato was funded by the USDA!  🎉🎈

• Also another federal grant from NSF! 🎉🎈

 

Fall 2022

• After 5.5 years in the lab, we are sad but also overjoyed to see Liz Mahood leave with her PhD degree. Liz will join Corteva Biosciences in the Crop Protection group! 🎉🎈

• Kanza Arshad joins the lab as an MPS student on a Fulbright scholarship. Welcome Kanza!

• Jacob Novozhenets from Biomedical Engineering joins the lab. Welcome Jacob!

• Mac Flanagan wins the Cornell CALS undergraduate research grant to work on Physalis metabolites! 🎉🎈

• Gaurav presents the lab's research at Purdue University, Zhejiang University and University of Toronto - Scarborough. Thank you for the invitations!

• Annual Reviews in Plant Biology - review on BAHDs published! (Gaurav, Lars)

• Multiple papers submitted!

• Botanical Society of America Phytochemical Section symposium proposal on plant defenses accepted! 🎉🎈

• Cornell Intercampus Symposium proposal on "Drug Discovery from Nature's Metabolites" accepted! 🎉🎈(clickable link)

• Manuscript with 55 or so co-authors on protein function prediction published in the journal Databases.

 

Summer 2022

• USDA - Hatch award on effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis on cold tolerance funded! 🎉🎈

• Gaurav presents at PSNA at Virginia Tech

• Bhaswati leaves the lab after a fantastic four months! We will miss you!

​

Spring 2022

• Gaurav is selected as a TW Turner Fellowship Mentor and a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow.

• Congratulations Liz for getting awarded the ASPB Travel Award!! 🎉🎈

• Congratulations Irfan for getting awarded the Atkinson Center small grant! 🎉🎈

• Our HortRes manuscript is now online.

• Bhaswati Sarmah joins the lab as an ICAR-World Bank visiting fellow

• Gaurav co-chairs a session in a workshop on Protein Function Prediction organized at University of Florida - Gainesville.

​

Fall 2021

• Jiho Lee is awarded the Morley award and Dextra award for UG research on carotenoids. Go Jiho!  🎉🎈

• Manuscript on resin glycoside diversity in morning glories accepted in Horticulture Research special issue on Specialized Metabolism in Horticultural Crops

• Jiho Lee, Arden Lee, Nandita Nagarajan join the lab as undergrad researchers. Welcome!

• Bryce Askey joins for his second rotation.

• Manuscript on importance of acylsugars in N. benthamiana aphid and drought response published, in collaboration with the Jander lab.

• Alexandre Miaule joins the lab for his rotation

 

Summer 2021

• Manuscript on resin glycoside identification now on bioRxiv

• Two manuscripts accepted - sweet potato anthocyanins/flavonoids identification (Ali, Scientific Reports) and a review on laticifers and latex (Arielle, Current Opinion in Plant Biology) 

• Liz wins the best talk award at the Phytochemistry session at Botany 2021 🎉🎈

• Liz awarded the prestigious USDA-NIFA predoctoral fellowship! 🎉🎈

• Irfan is selected into the ASPB Early Career committee. 🎉🎈

• Our review on Evolution-aided engineering of plant metabolism published in aBiotech.

​

Spring 2021

• Chinmaey gets an internship at a Texas biomedical genomics company

• Sejin is a finalist at the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board symposium for her honors thesis work. 

• Our manuscript on Solanum habrochaites population genomics and phenotypic evolution published in Molecular Biology and Evolution 🎉🎈

​

Fall 2020

• Liz selected for a data scientist summer internship at Corteva. Way to go Liz! 🎉🎈

• Lars' BAHD paper submitted to bioRxiv and for review.

• Mohammad Irfan joins the lab as a postdoc! Irfan is an expert on tomato biochemistry. Welcome Irfan! 🎉🎈

• Arielle Johnson co-joins the Moghe/Frank lab groups working on the Euphorbia project. Welcome Arielle! 🎉🎈

 

Summer 2020

• Ali's first paper on sweet potato anthocyanins on bioRxiv and under review.

• We bid goodbye to Alexandra Bennett, our lab tech for 3 years, who is moving to Vienna for graduate studies in analytical chemistry. She will be sorely missed!

• Ben Fehr -- computational biology graduate student -- joins the lab for his rotation.

• Nandita Nagarajan -- a high schooler from NJ -- completes a very successful virtual summer internship in the lab working on cis-regulatory element discovery.

• Lars and Gaurav present at the ASPB Global Summit. Liz presents a poster at ISCB.

• Gaurav presents at UCSD (virtually). Thanks to Eric Schmelz for the invitation!

 

Spring 2020

• Liz is now a co-PI on a successful Schmittau-Novak small grant from SIPS, with Olenka (PI) from Olena Vatamaniuk lab. 🎉🎈

• Solanum quitoense -- a system Gaurav developed in his postdoc -- finally sees light of the day in Plant Physiology, thanks to Bryan Leong's persistent efforts in the Last lab!

• Paper on rice interactome with Susan McCouch and Haiyuan Yu accepted in PNAS!

• Liz's review titled Machine learning: A powerful tool for gene function prediction in plants -- a detailed primer of ML for functional genomics -- just got accepted in Applications in Plant Sciences! 🎉🎈

• Excited for meeting the Plant Natural Products group graduate students and faculty at Rutgers, New Brunswick.

• Gaurav presents preliminary data on sweet potato metabolite analysis at the NY State Producer's Expo, Syracuse.

 

October 2019

• Thanks to University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Plant Science Innovation for an excellent one-day symposium on Plant Metabolism and Engineering!

• Liz completes her A-exam! She's officially a PhD candidate! 🎉🎈

​

August 2019

• Gaurav presents in the Inaugural Presidential session at ASPB 2019, San Jose: "All in the family: Emergence of new functions in plant enzyme families"

• Jason wins the second prize in the Cornell-BTI REU poster presentation. Congratulations! 🎉🎈

​

June 2019

• Jason Chobirko from the University of Pittsburgh joins our lab as part of the Cornell-BTI REU program.

• Cornell Biotechnology Resource Center Seed Grant (co-PI: Margaret Frank) on studying Euphorbiaceae latex and laticifers accepted! 🎉🎈

​

May 2019

• Our USDA-Hatch proposal for quantifying anthocyanins and carotenoids from NY-grown sweet potatoes accepted! 🎉🎈

​

March 2019

• Michael Miller -- a PLBIO grad student -- joins the lab for his third rotation

 

January 2019

• Gordon Younkin and Nicole Szeluga -- PLBIO grad students -- join lab for their second rotations

• New AJB paper on evolutionary biochemistry co-authored with fellow Botany meeting presenters, shepherded by Stacey Smith and Chris Pires now online!

​

December 2018

• Our proposal to JGI-CSP for Brachypodium transcriptomics and metabolomics was just accepted! 🎉🎈Major work to start in February!

 

October 2018

• Kai Fan joins our lab as a Visiting Fellow on a CSC fellowship from China for 1 year

​

September 2018

• Se-Jin Park joins our lab as an undergrad

• Anna-Lena Sprick joins the lab as a visiting intern from Christian Albrecht University of Kiel for 2 months

​

July 2018

• Lars was just awarded the German DFG fellowship for 2 years! 🎉🎈

​

June 2018

• Our AJB paper is now online 🎉🎈

• Liz Mahood embarks on her PhD journey in the lab! 🎉🎈

• Welcome - Elena Lazarus! Elena comes to our lab for 10 weeks from the University of Portland, as part of the Boyce Thompson Institute REU program.

​

April 2018

• We are now also a part of the Cornell Computational Biology graduate field.

 

March 2018

• Gaurav is the recipient of the 2018 ASPB Early Career award!🎉🎈

• Our opinion piece titled "The study of plant specialized metabolism in the genomics era: Challenges and prospects" just got accepted in the American Journal of Botany.

​

January 2018

• Check out our commentary on Hiroshi Maeda's wonderful paper on betalain evolution in New Phytologist.

• Arielle Johnson joins our lab as a rotating graduate student.

​

Older updates: click here

​

​

​