Sau Shan Cheng

The Chinese University of Hong Kong | CUHK · School of Life Sciences

The membranes of plant cells are dynamic structures composed of phospholipids and proteins. Proteins harboring phospholipid-binding domains or lipid ligands can localize to membranes. Stress perception can alter the subcellular localization of these proteins dynamically, causing them to either associate with or detach from membranes. The mechanisms...

Arabidopsis thaliana has been used regularly as a model plant in gene expression studies on transcriptional reprogramming upon pathogen infection, such as that by Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 ( Pst DC3000), or when subjected to stress hormone treatments including jasmonic acid (JA), salicylic acid (SA), and abscisic acid (ABA). Reverse tr...

GTP is an important signaling molecule involved in the growth, development, and stress adaptability of plants. The functions are mediated via binding to GTPases which are in turn regulated by GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs). Satellite reports have suggested the positive roles of GAPs in regulating ABA signaling and pathogen resistance in plants....

Soybean is a food crop in high demand in Northeast Asia. Besides protein and oil, soybean is also a rich source of health-beneficial secondary metabolites such as flavonoids, terpenes, and alkaloids. The long history of soybean domestication resulted in a rich collection of soybean germplasms, which could be generally categorized as wild, landrace,...

Multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) transporters are ancient proteins conserved among various kingdoms, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. In plants, MATEs usually form a large family in the genome. Homologous MATE transporters have different subcellular localizations, substrate specificities, and responses to external stimuli for functional...

The omics approaches allow the scientific community to successfully identify genomic regions associated with traits of interest for marker-assisted breeding. Agronomic traits such as seed color, yield, growth habit, and stress tolerance have been the targets for soybean molecular breeding. Genes governing these traits often undergo post-transcripti...

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is an important legume crop that provides high-quality vegetable protein and oil. In general, oil makes up around 19% of the dry weight of a soybean seed, with the five most abundant fatty acids being palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acids. Storage proteins make up roughly 40% of the dry seed weight...

In plants, the translocation of molecules, such as ions, metabolites, and hormones, between different subcellular compartments or different cells is achieved by transmembrane transporters, which play important roles in growth, development, and adaptation to the environment. To facilitate transport in a specific direction, active transporters that c...

Multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) transporters in eukaryotes have been characterized to be antiporters that mediate the transport of substrates in exchange for protons. In plants, alkaloids, phytohormones, ion chelators, and flavonoids have been reported to be the substrates of MATE transporters. Structural analyses have been conducted...

Natural antisense transcripts (NATs) have been generally reported as negative regulators of their sense counterparts. Multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) proteins mediate the transport of various substrates. Although MATEs have been identified genome-wide in various plant species, their transcript regulators remain unclear. Here, using th...

Soybeans are nutritionally important as human food and animal feed. Apart from the macronutrients such as proteins and oils, soybeans are also high in health-beneficial secondary metabolites and are uniquely enriched in isoflavones among food crops. Isoflavone biosynthesis has been relatively well characterized, but the mechanism of their transport...

Global warming poses severe threats to agricultural production, including soybean. One of the major mechanisms for organisms to combat heat stress is through heat shock proteins (HSPs) that stabilize protein structures at above‐optimum temperatures, by assisting in the folding of nascent, misfolded, or unfolded proteins. The HSP40 subgroups, or the...

Soybean is an important crop as both human food and animal feed. However, the yield of soybean is heavily impacted by biotic stresses including insect attack and pathogen infection. Insect bites usually make the plants vulnerable to pathogen infection, which causes diseases. Fungi, oomycetes, bacteria, viruses, and nematodes are major soybean patho...

Flavonoids are a class of polyphenolic compounds that naturally occur in plants. Sub-groups of flavonoids include flavone, flavonol, flavanone, flavanonol, anthocyanidin, flavanol and isoflavone. The various modifications on flavonoid molecules further increase the diversity of flavonoids. Certain crops are famous for being enriched in specific fla...