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 for 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, and cell death. Tenai has also recently identified proteins with new roles in defense based on enhanced disease susceptibility phenotypes. Tenai's goal is to create a defense interactome map that is based on the early regulatory proteins that she has discovered and their interacting partners.