Category Archives: Uncategorized

On March 24-26, 2018, Kang lab members participated in the southern section meeting of ASPB. The meeting was held in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dinesh presented a short seminar and, SungIl and Ji-Chul presented a poster.

San Marcos High School student Isabella Elmore competed and won the first place at the Texas Science and Engineering Fair’s two-day event in San Antonio the weekend of March 22. Isabella competed in the Life Science division in the category of Biochemistry. Her project is entitled “Engineering a bacterial pathogen with an enhanced luminescence reporter for a high-throughput resistance assay”.

This year, San Marcos School District hosted the first science showcase on Jan 20. This event was to honor the campus science fair winners. Dr. Kang introduced our outreach program for a high school student. Isabella also had an opportunity to present her science project.

Yogendra and Hallie got married on December 23, 2017. Congratulations and we all wish both a lifetime happiness.  

Yogendra, the first Ph.D. student in the lab, successfully defended his thesis entitled “Epigenetic regulation of the defense gene induction in Arabidopsis thaliana in response to Pseudomonas syringae” on November 3, 2017. His committee consists of the following members: Dr. Dan Klessig (Cornell U.), Dr. Ping He (Texas A&M), Dr. Nihal Dharmasiri (Texas State), and Dr. Suni Dharmasiri (Texas State). We sincerely thank him for his excellent work and contribution. 

Starting in September, 2017, Dr. Kang has been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. He also received a college achievement award for the excellence in scholarly/creative activities.

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:

• Nicole: Ph.D studentship, Biochem & Molecular Biology, University of Florida
• Kinsey: M.S. studentship, College of Health Profession, Texas State University
• Lars: M.D. studentship, U of Texas – Austin

We also have two undergrad students joining the lab as follows. Welcome!:

• Jovanny Salinas
• Jose Gutierrez

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*