Congratulations to Pratibha Kumari! The former PhD student of the Cellular Coordination research group receives this year's Best Paper Award of the German Society for Plant Sciences for the best publication in plant research. In her article, published two years ago in Nature Plants, she describes a class of proteins that play a key role in plant cell division. These IQD proteins are linked to the cytoskeleton of plant cells and are thus part of a navigation system that determines the spatial orientation of cell division. If these proteins are missing in plant cells, the cell division planes are no longer correctly established, resulting in the divided cells arranging themselves rather chaotically and no longer according to an ordered pattern within the tissue. With her work, Dr. Kumari has considerably expanded the knowledge of cell division in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and thus also made an important contribution to the general understanding of plant growth and development. Pratibha Kumari is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Umeå Plant Science Centre at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Sweden. The young scientist may be heading back to her old workplace to receive her award certificate. The award ceremony will take place at the next Botanik-Tagung - which will be held in Halle an der Saale in 2024. However, she will receive the prize money of 1000 euros immediately.
More on awards for early career plant scientists: https://www.deutsche-botanische-gesellschaft.de/en/about-us-0/promoting-early-career-scientists