Xueping Zhou, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is a 2018 Fellow of The American Phytopathological Society (APS). This honor recognizes distinguished contributions to plant pathology in one or more of the following areas: original research, teaching, administration, professional and public service, and extension and outreach.

Xueping Zhou, center, receives the APS Fellow Award at ICPP2018​

What area(s) of molecular plant–microbe interactions do you feel your research has impacted most?

Our work mainly focused on plant–virus interaction using geminiviruses. We revealed that βC1, encoded by a geminivirus satellite, is a symptom determinant, a repressor of transcriptional gene silencing (TGS) and post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS), and also a target of many plant defense responses, including phosphorylation modifications-mediated function suppression and ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy-mediated protein degradation. These studies extend the interaction between viruses and their hosts and show a co-evolved balance during the long-term “arms race” between plants and viruses, which provides new insight into plant defenses against geminivirus–betasatellite complexes and viral counterdefense measures.

What advice do you have for young scientists aspiring to achieve the level of science that has major impact?

First of all, focus on scientific questions that exist in nature. Second, pursue your goal and finish your project with careful study and deep consideration. As science and technology develop very fast, you need to apply different knowledge and methods from cross-disciplinary fields into your profession.

When you were a post-doc, what had the largest influence on your decision to enter your specific research area in your permanent position? Was this a “hot topic” at the time, or did you choose to go in a different direction?

Since finishing my post-doc, I have been working on plant–virus interaction using geminiviruses. The main reason I decided to work on this specific research is the serious threat of geminiviruses in crops in China. We have been committed to understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of geminiviruses, exploring and exploiting valuable resistance strategies against geminivirus infection. It is a hot topic in the field of plant virology. We noticed that viruses led to a large loss in rice yields. Therefore, now we also work on interaction between the plant and the rice stripe virus.