To recognize the work of early-career scientists, the MPMI editorial board has implemented a new award series to honor the best paper published by a student first author. For 2020, that award goes to Sarah Pottinger for her paper “Optimizing the PBS1 Decoy System to Confer Resistance to Potyvirus Infection in Arabidopsis and Soybean.” 

“I found Sarah’s work on engineering PBS1 as a modifiable decoy to be innovative and creative, and the possibility of creating novel resistance traits in crops has exciting implications for agriculture,” said Jeanne Harris, the MPMI editor-in-chief. “In addition, I appreciated the logical way she leads her reader through the reasoning behind her experiments and subsequent conclusions.”

Sarah Pottinger is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Roger Innes lab at Indiana University, Bloomington, where her research focuses on investigating the Arabidopsis RPS5/PBS1 decoy system to optimize plant immune responses. She is exploring the use of proximity-based labeling to identify possible signaling partners for RPS5 as well as working towards elucidating a structure for PBS1 and RPS5. She hopes to graduate in 2022 and pursue postdoctoral studies in NLR signaling and specificity.

The MPMI editorial board also identified the following papers as honorable mentions:

Structural Requirements of the Phytoplasma Effector Protein SAP54 for Causing Homeotic Transformation of Floral Organ
Marc Benjamin Aurin, et al.

Prediction and Characterization of RXLR Effectors in Pythium Species
Gan Ai, et al.

Chitin Triggers Calcium-Mediated Immune Response in the Plant Model Physcomitrella patens
Giulia Galotto, et al.