John Hamilton (@jphamilton)

Research Associate-Fixed Term - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The Li lab in the Department of Plant Biology is recruiting a postdoctoral research associate to work on project(s) in plant molecular biology, biochemistry, and/or genomics. The idea...

MSU is great place to do plant science research. My lab will be a great place to develop new expertise in genomics and plant molecular biology.

Application instruction and link: careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...

Please email me if you have any questions.

04.09.2025 14:00 👍 31 🔁 29 💬 0 📌 1

Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.

Please share! I'm looking for a postdoc. The position is to lead one of the following projects: 1) regulation of plant specialized metabolism by cell fate, or 2) foliar embryogenesis in the succulent plant Kalanchoe.

Learn more abt projects: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/res...

04.09.2025 14:00 👍 88 🔁 110 💬 1 📌 3

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

Last week I requested a tech and a postdoc position to be created and submitted the ads for those positions. Stay tuned for the official ad. For inquiries, my contact can be found here: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/

14.08.2025 20:24 👍 19 🔁 14 💬 0 📌 0

Congrats Li, the space looks great!

06.08.2025 14:01 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My technician is looking for plant biology related master’s program in Europe. Please send me suggestions. Thanks.

#PlantScience

11.12.2024 14:30 👍 13 🔁 6 💬 13 📌 2

Cell‐type‐aware regulatory landscapes governing monoterpene indole alkaloid biosynthesis in the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus In plants, the biosynthetic pathways of some specialized metabolites are partitioned into specialized or rare cell types, as exemplified by the monoterpenoid indole alkaloid (MIA) pathway of Cathara...

(Re-)sharing my recent paper! We applied single cell RNA-seq + ATAC-seq to study how alkaloid specialized metabolism is regulated across cell types in the medicinal plant Catharanthus (Madagascar periwinkle). Thread 🧵.

#PlantSciences

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

18.11.2024 14:38 👍 23 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0

schematic of code used to move between different Bioconductor containers supported by tidyomics

schematic of how common grammar can be applied to different Bioconductor data objects

This preprint describes tidyomics, a community-led effort to enable application of grammar from tidyverse to omics data in Bioconductor. I've been greatly impressed with the crowd-sourcing of issues via GitHub Projects.

preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

github: github.com/tidyomics

14.09.2023 12:48 👍 86 🔁 34 💬 3 📌 4

John Hamilton

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