Engineering nitrogenase into plants – towards functional studies

Date

6 November 2018, Tuesday

Time and Venues

Venues	Local Time	Time Zone
Adelaide Waite Campus – B101-FG-R00-SmallWICWest	12:00 pm	ACDT
Armidale – B55-FG-R00-Small	12:30 pm	AEDT
Bribie Island – B01-FG-Small	11:30 pm	AEST
Brisbane St Lucia QBP – Room 5.140	11:30 pm	AEST
Canberra Black Mountain – Discovery Lecture Theatre	12:30 pm	AEDT
Canberra Crace – Bld44- Meeting Room 3	12:30 pm	AEDT
Irymple (See Natalie Strickland)	12:30 pm	AEDT
Narrabri Myall Vale – Conference Room	12:30 pm	AEDT
Perth Floreat B40-F1-R46-Rossiter Room	09:30 am	AWST
Sandy Bay (Hobart) – River View Room	12:30 pm	AEDT
Toowoomba – Meeting Room	11:30 pm	AEST
Townsville (see Liz Do)	11:30 pm	AEST
Werribee (Melbourne) – Peacock Room	12:30 pm	AEDT

Speaker

Synopsis

Engineering non-legume plants to fix their own nitrogen would deliver great economic and ecological benefits. In our lab, we are exploring the possibility of transferring bacterial nitrogenase genes directly into plants. Nitrogenase is the enzyme that catalyses biological nitrogen fixation. It contains unique oxygen-sensitive cofactors that rely on various accessory proteins for their assembly. We have already successfully expressed nitrogenase and its accessory proteins in the mitochondrial matrix. We are now setting up assays to explore whether these proteins are functional.

About the speaker

Christina completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and received a PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her PhD research focused on the maturation of oxygen-sensitive metalloproteins. In 2017 she joined CSIRO as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Craig Wood’s team. She is currently setting up an anaerobic facility to study the biochemistry of nitrogenase proteins.