Sonia E. Evans is Published in Nature Plants!

Hot Papers
Sonia E. Evans smiling in front of a window with a city scape in the background. she is wearing a colourful dress with african patterning and round glasses
Pictured: Sonia E. Evans, PhD Student (Phillips Lab)

🔥 Hot Paper Alert! 🔥
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This week the UTM Biology department is celebrating PhD student, Sonia E. Evans, also this year’s recipient of the Roberta Bondar award, who has published her second Nature-branded paper this year, this time in Nature Plants. Here, Sonia’s work focuses on Rubisco, nature’s most important enzyme, which fixes carbon dioxide in the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle. Its lesser-known side job is supplying pyruvate in the chloroplast, and Sonia’s description of this moonlighting function has solved a long-standing paradox of central metabolism. Joined by fellow Phillips lab member Scott Ford, who recently defended his Master’s project on an adjacent topic, Sonia applied mass spectrometry, traditional biochemistry, and whole plant physiology to overturn the prevailing model of pyruvate origin in chloroplasts. As a universal precursor for isoprenoids, fatty acids, and branched chain amino acids, the origin of pyruvate in chloroplasts has been a legitimate mystery for decades, and the surprising conclusion that Rubisco is responsible for it changes our understanding of central plant metabolism. Crucially, Sonia’s findings connect carbon assimilation directly to isoprenoid biosynthesis and present new opportunities to engineer this valuable group of natural products.

Congrats, Sonia!

Follow this link to read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-024-01791-z

a newspaper style poster to acknowledge phd student sonia evans' most recently published research paper. there is a short blurb saying we are recognizing her and summarizing her work, and there is also a picture of her in a blue circle frame where she is smiling in a brightly coloured traditional Nigerian dress, with a city in the background, she is clearly up on a high floor in the building

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