Biochemical Pathways and Environmental Responses in Plants: Part B

Biochemical Pathways and Environmental Responses in Plants, Part B, Volume 682 in the Methods in Enzymology series, highlights advances in the field with this new volume presenting chapters on MIE 681/682: Biochemical pathways and environmental responses in plants, Structure, function, and engineering of plant polyketide synthases, A sensitive LC-MS/MS assay for enzymatic characterization of methylthioalkylmalate synthase involved in glucosinolate side-chain elongation, Assaying formate-tetrahydrofolate ligase with monoglutamylated and polyglutamylated substrates using a fluorescence-HPLC based assay, An Approach to Nearest Neighbor Analysis of Pigmented Protein Complexes by Using Chemical Crosslinking in Combination with Mass Spectrometry, Biochemical characterization of plant aromatic aminotransferases, and much more.

Other chapters focus on Functional Analysis of Phosphoethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PMT) in Plants and Parasites, A structure-guided computational screening approach for predicting plant enzyme-metabolite interactions, Plant metacaspase: an example of microcrystal structure determination and analysis, Biocatalytic system for comparative assessment of functional association of cytochrome P450 monooxygenases with their redox partners, Dirigent Protein Family Function and Structure, and more.

• Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors
• Presents the latest release in Methods in Enzymology series
• Includes the latest information on Biochemical pathways and environmental responses in plants

Prof. Jez received his B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State University (1992), a Ph.D. in biochemistry & molecular biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania (1998), and was an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1998-2001). After working as a research scientist at Kosan Biosciences (2001-2002), he started his research group at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and moved to the Department of Biology at Washington University in 2008. He has authored more than 160 papers and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2005), the Phytochemical Society of North America's Arthur Neish Young Investigator Award (2007), and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award (2012) and was named as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2014. Research in the Jez lab seeks to understand how environmental changes re-model biochemical pathways in plants at the molecular, cellular, and organism levels with the aim of engineering these systems to address agricultural and environmental problems. Current work in the lab employs a combination of structural biology, protein chemistry, and plant biology. He also launched the Biotech Explorers Program, which aims to introduce undergraduates to how teams in science can tackle real world problems using cross-disciplinary approaches.