McGill Plant Science students win big for conference presentations

Congratulations to two plant science students in Professor Mehran Dastmalchi's lab, who received awards for their presentations at two recent conferences!

Earlier this month, at the Gordon Research Conference on Plant Metabolic Engineering in Barcelona, Ph.D. Candidate Fanfan Li won best poster presentation for her poster titled "Linking physiology and specialized metabolism in a lesion mimic mutant of Catharanthus roseus," out of 83 student and postdoctoral research posters.

At last week's Annual Meeting of the Phytochemical Society of North America (PSNA) in Toronto, Dastmalchi's students took home two of four awards given for best student/postdoc oral presentation.

Li won again, this time for her oral presentation, “Describing the orchestrated gene shift in a mutant of Madagascar periwinkle accumulating akuammicine.”

The other winner, Lee-Marie Raytek, also won for her presentation, "At crossroads: Investigating chalcone isomerase-like (CHIL) in branched isoflavonoid biosynthesis."

Photo: Raytek and Li receive their awards at the Annual Meeting of the PSNA (second and third from the left, respectively)