Yogendra received a travel grant for 28th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research this summer. He presented a poster entitled “Pathogen Infection and MORC1 Affect Chromatin Accessibility of Transposable Elements and Expression of Their Proximal Genes in Arabidopsis”. 
We have three undergrad students leaving for the new adventure as follows. We sincerely thank them for the contribution:
We also have two undergrad students joining the lab as follows. Welcome!:
In June 2018, Kang lab will move to a new building, Engineering and Science Building. The lab and student office at over 1,200 sq ft will be situated on the top floor overlooking downtown San Marcos.
Since last year, we and other labs in the department of biology have acquired several genomics tools. We are now running most of the genomics procedures on site and welcome any collaboration requests. Following is a part of the equipment list (* phyically locate in the lab; the others are in the building):
i) Agilent Bioanalyzer
ii) Illumina MiSeq Sequencer
iii) Bioruptor Pico*
iv) Nanopore MinIon Sequencer*
We celebrated successful completion of Phoenix’s science fair project with the Orta family. Mr Stedman and Yogi also came for celebration as well. Thanks everyone! 
Phoenix, a freshmen from San Marcos High School, presented her science fair project last Friday in Alamo Regional Science Fair, entitled “CRISPR-CAS9, the most popular genome editing tool, led to a poor response to drought stress in plants: Is CRISPR-CAS9 safe to use?”. This project was placed second and advanced to the state fair. Congrat!
Dr. Kang will teach a new graduate course, BIO7360: Advanced genomics and bioinformatics, starting Fall 2017. This course will target graduate students who has experience in basic cluster computing tools and intend to provide hands-on experience to process and analyze data produced from contemporary genomic tools. Note that BIO4480: Cytology and microtechniques, which has been open every year, will alternate with this course starting next year. Anyone interested in these two courses should plan ahead.
We are now transiting to LEAP Next-Generation High Performance Computing Cluster. This new computing server has 3,516 cores, nearly 6 times more than the current STAR cluster. More details can be found at the following site: http://www.vpit.txstate.edu/rc/leap.html.
Dr. Sung Il Kim joined the lab in September as a post-doctoral fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Seoul National University. He published ten peer-reviewed papers during his Ph.D training including four 1st-authored, most of which look into ubiquitin modification in plants. Kang lab members who participated in the interview unanimously found him as the best candidate among the candidate pool last year. We are very excited to have him in the lab. Welcome aboard!
During the summer of 2016, Mr. Stedman, AP-biology teacher, and Phoenix, a freshman, from San Marcos High School participated in summer research in Kang lab. Phoenix has generated transgenic plants carrying with CRIPSR-Cas9 constructs with help from Yogi and is characterizing these plants. This project is to test how safe this revolutionary genome editing tool is in plants.
This research activity was featured in a local newspaper: http://www.sanmarcosrecord.com/news/smhs-and-texas-state-university-partner-grant-manipulate-plant-genes.
If you are a local high school student and very motivated to learn research, please contact Dr. Kang or Mr Stedman for more details.
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