Renate Weizbauer Email & Phone Number

I deeply enjoy tackling challenging problems, developing new tools, and applying my experience as a plant molecular, cell and synthetic biologist to study and enable biology that can solve larger societal problems, such as brought forth by changing climate conditions, for example growing foods and developing biological carbon capture technologies. Currently working as a postdoc at Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford, I have worked on different angles of how the plant cell assembles and modifies the wall matrix that surrounds it:1. I have successfully used a forward genetic screen coupled with NGS to find proteins that facilitate the interaction between the microtubule network and the cellulose synthesizing machinery;2. I have visualized the localization patterns and dynamics of a cell wall protein to gain insight into how environmental changes might affect wall organization; and 3. I have developed several novel antibody fragment-based tools to overcome a longstanding problem in the field of cell wall biology, that is, to be able to visualize different carbohydrates from synthesis to insertion into the cell wall and possible changes of localization patterns during different stresses, in living organisms, and at high spatio-temporal resolution. These range from simple CarboProbes -antibody fragments specific to a carbohydrate fused to a fluorescent protein- to CarboSensors that can change their fluorescent output based on binding to the carbohydrate, making them more useful for tracking carbohydrates in vivo. I am also an early editor for bio-protocol, a journal focused on reproducibility in life sciences and helping bench scientists accelerate their research by creating access to expansive protocols. Started in 2011 by postdocs in our department as a platform to exchange workable protocols, this project has grown into a scientific journal with PubMed ID, partnered with other journals and organizations, pushing for reproducible methods. I have spearheaded a special issue on CRISPR-Cas in 2016 (https://bio-protocol.org/special_issue.aspx?siid=11 ) and am scientific lead and starting member of e.g. the webinar (https://bio-protocol.org/webinar ) and ambassador program.

Listed skills include Molecular Biology, Molecular Cloning, Cell Biology, Genetics, and 17 others.