Pat Zambryski
Pat Zambryski is professor of plant and microbial biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is one of the pioneers in the development of genetic engineering in plants by discovering how the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens transfers DNA into the plants it infects. Fundamental insights applicable to numerous areas of bacterial and plant biology have been uncovered by investigations into Agrobacterium.
Pat Zambryski grew up in Montreal, Canada, where she graduated from McGill University, and earned her PhD from the University of Colorado. After postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she spent five years as a senior investigator at Ghent University in Belgium. She is a Fellow at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Zambryski's current research focuses on two distinct areas. In microbial biology she continues to work with her lab on unraveling the molecular mechanisms utilised by Agrobacterium that leads to the genetic transformation of plant cells. In plant biology she and her lab study how plant cells communicate with each other via unique plant specific intercellular structures called plasmodesmata.
At the beginning of October 2014, Professor Patricia Zambryski will visit the University of Strasbourg as part of the USIAS short visits programme. She will be welcomed by Manfred Heinlein.
Workshop - Intracellular Communication in Plants
August 24-29, 2014 | Bischoffsheim, Alsace, France
EMBO workshop
Intercellular Communication in Plant Development and Disease
This workshop is organised under the auspices of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and a number of other sponsors. At the workshop 24 internationally recognised speakers originating from 10 countries will interact with 120 selected participants about the latest discoveries in their field. The workshop is organised by USIAS Fellow 2012 Manfred Heinlein. Among the speakers is USIAS visiting fellow Professor Pat Zambryski from the University of California in Berkeley.
Plants are sessile organisms that need to respond to changing environments during development. As a result they have evolved unique signalling mechanisms through plasmodesmata that allow rapid communication between different parts of the plant. Communication through plasmodesmata involves the trafficking of informational macromolecules such as transcription factors, gene transcripts, and small RNAs. Moreover, viral pathogens exploit these cell wall channels for intercellular and systemic spread, which often results in serious crop diseases. The EMBO workshop will bring together scientists working on plasmodesmata structure and regulation, plant development, defense signaling, gene silencing, and virus movement.
