Remorin, a Solanaceae Protein Resident in Membrane Rafts and Plasmodesmata, Impairs Potato virus X Movement
Plant Cell Raffaele et al.
21: 1541
Author Profile
Sylvain Raffaele
Current Position: Research Associate, The Sainsbury Laboratory, John Innes Centre, UK
Education: PhD: Laboratory for Plant-Microbes Interactions studies, Department of Plant Biotechnologies, Toulouse University / INRA, France
Non-scientific Interests: Snowboarding, hiking, reading sci-fi, novels and comics
More than 500 million years of innovation is what make plants so fascinating to me. A significant part of this innovation has been driven by the arm race with pathogens. Plant-pathogen interaction processes are indeed highly dynamic both at the cell life scale and at the evolutionary scale. My PhD work, in Dr. Dominique Roby’s lab in Toulouse/France, was dedicated to the response of Arabidopsis to pathogenic bacteria. It pointed to the role of plasma membrane lipids at a time when metabolomics was gaining interest from pathologists. These days, the lipid rafts model is an emerging topic in the plant field, and a matter of lively debate. I took the opportunity of a post doc position in Dr Sebastien Mongrand’s lab in Bordeaux, France to join the community of raft-enthusiasts. Little being known on plant Detergent-Insoluble Membranes (DIM) and on remorin proteins, the project was challenging, but also very stimulating for our creativity. We learnt a lot, and benefitted greatly from help from our various collaborators. I really appreciated that Sebastien’s communicating energy was key to unify this little community and to keep the project so entertaining. Betting that more complex would mean even more fun, I switched to the study of eukaryotic plant pathogens for my new project.
