We’re looking forward to the new year with four new virtual seminars! This series is freely available to all.

I hope this newsletter finds everyone healthy and that their semester is off to a great start.

Our IS-MPMI community has proven to be remarkably resilient during these turbulent times. The launch of several new society initiatives has been instrumental in keeping us connected and enabling us to share our exciting research from afar. Kudos to MPMI Editor-in-Chief Jeanne Harris and her team for hosting the monthly What’s New in MPMI Virtual Seminar series highlighting research advances published in the MPMI journal. These free events have been instrumental in engaging colleagues working on plant–microbe interactions, both society members and nonmembers, from 61 countries.

We have also received enthusiastic feedback on the eSymposia series and Translational Science Workshops held in 2021. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, and moderators for their contributions. Moving forward, we aim to offer additional online events, especially during non-congress years. I encourage you to submit your suggestions for new research themes to cover in the near future. Feel free to write to me.

Unfortunately, we had to cancel the 2022 IS-MPMI Congress planned for JeJu, Korea, due to the uncertainty of COVID-19 impacting the safety of our community. We are so grateful to the entire local organizing committee, led by Professors Doil Choi, Keehoon Sohn, and Ho Won Jung and the Korean Society for Plant Pathology, for their extraordinary efforts to plan a congress during a pandemic. We hope to hold a meeting in Korea in the coming years.

Our inability to gather in-person as a society again this year has greatly impacted our junior colleagues and their professional development. To address this, IS-MPMI will be hosting two half-day virtual symposia to highlight the work of early-career researchers. The dates are June 8 and 9 and September 20 and 21, 2022. More details about the 2022 Early Career Showcase can be found here. Please nominate your colleagues! The deadline is March 31. We will follow up with a speaker program very soon. This event is free to society members.

I am hopeful that 2023 will allow us to meet in-person. Be sure to mark your calendars for July 16–20, 2023, to join us for our 2023 IS-MPMI Congress in Providence, RI, USA. Roger Innes will take the helm of our society in July 2022 as president and is leading efforts to organize a stimulating meeting program.

In closing, I would like to send peaceful wishes and support to our colleagues around the world, especially those who are impacted by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Our academic and research missions play important and long-lasting roles in the vitality of our global society.​

Wishing you all the best,

Mary Beth Mudgett

President, IS-MPMI

University of California-Davis and IS-MPMI member Dr. Pam Ronald has been awarded the 2022 International Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice.” The Wolf Prize is awarded annually to scientists and artists for their achievements in the interest of humankind and friendly relations among people. Dr. Ronald is a distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology, having joined the faculty in 1992. She is also affiliated with the UC Davis Genome Center, the Innovative Genomics Institute, and the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Ronald is the first woman among six UC Davis scientists to receive the award, and she joins Dr. Ilan Chet (1998) as IS-MPMI members who have been awarded this prestigious prize. About a year ago, Dr. Ronald was awarded the World Agriculture Prize, and you can read about her accomplishments and insights in an InterStellar interview led by Nick Colaianni published in Interactions in December 2021.

The nomination period to present research at the 2022 Early Career Showcase has been extended! This new event provides the opportunity for senior graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to present important MPMI research to colleagues and industry leaders. The showcase will take place online June 8–​9 and September 20–​21 and is free to all IS-MPMI members—mark your calendar!

Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your work. Nominate yourself, a colleague, or a student before March 31. Submit your nomination today!​

The March MPMI Microgreens podcast presents an interview with Ralph Panstruga and Matthew Moscou on the MPMI journal’s Top 10 Unanswered Questions in MPMI question #6. Find out the interesting way in which they reframe the question on the fly in this new episode.

Watch Li-Jun Ma and Houlin Yu discuss their recent MPMI Editor’s Pick paper, “Metatranscriptomic Comparison of Endophytic and Pathogenic Fusarium–Arabidopsis Interactions Reveals Plant Transcriptional Plasticity,” and stay for the engaging Q&A session that follows.

Listen to Pritha Ganguly discuss her MPMI​ Ed​itor’s Pick paper, “The Natural Antisense Transcript DONE40 Derived from the lncRNA ENOD40 Locus Interacts with SET Domain Protein ASHR3 During Inception of Symbiosis in Arachis hypogaea,” during the upcoming What’s New in MPMI! Virtual Seminar on April 4, 2022, at 10 AM Central (11 AM Eastern).

Register for the free seminar today! If you can’t attend live, you can visit this page to view the recording.

MPMI Focus Issues are an excellent way for authors to participate in highly cited issues alongside the related work of their peers. Learn more about the scope of the MPMI 2023 Focus Issue on The Plant Endomembrane System in MPMI and plan to submit your manuscript by June 30, 2022.

Abstracts for the ePosters presented during the December 1–2 eSymposia Plant–Microbe Interactions in the Environment—Navigating a Complex World have been posted to the December 2021 issue of MPMI. This is a great opportunity for those who were unable to attend the eSymposia to explore the emerging science presented at the 2021 online meeting.​

Increasingly, new evidence is revealing variability in the epitope regions of bacterial flagellin, including in regions harboring the microbe-associated molecular patterns flg22 and flgII-28 that are recognized by the pattern recognition receptors. Learn more from Maria Malvino and colleagues in their paper “Influence of Flagellin Polymorphisms, Gene Regulation, and Responsive Memory on the Motility of Xanthomonas Species That Cause Bacterial Spot Disease of Solanaceous Plants.”