Ren Zhang

Research Interests

Regulation of gene expression in plant development and under stress conditions

Metal tolerance and bioremediation

Genetic engineering of plants and microbes for application

Bioinformatics

Representative Publications

Walker JC, Zhang R (1990): Relationship of a putative receptor protein kinase from maize to the S-locus glycoproteins of Brassica. Nature 345 743-746

Zhang R, Dickinson MJ, Pryor AJ (1994) Double-stranded RNAs in the rust fungi. Annual Review of Phytopathology 34 115-133

Zhang R, Zhang X, Wang J, Letham DS, Mckinney SA, Higgins TJV (1995) The effect of auxin on cytokinin levels and metabolism in transgenic tobacco tissue expressing an ipt gene. Planta. 196 84-94

Cladwell R, Dai Y, Srivastava S, Lin Y-X, Zhang R (2008) Improving neural network promoter prediction by exploiting the lengths of coding and non-coding sequences. In: Y Liu and A. Sun (eds) Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) Springer, 116, 211–228

Sameer Tiwari, Ren Zhang, Elizabeth S. Dennis, Ming-Bo Wang (2008) RNA silencing and plant defence against viral and non-viral pathogens. In F Columbus (ed) “RNA Interference Research Progress”, Nova Scientific Publishers, NY (in press).

Current Students

PhD

Sherin Mary Alex (co-supervised by Ross Lilley, Yan-Xia Lin and Micheal Kelso)

Structural and functional studies of arsenic resistance related proteins

Sameer Tiwari (co-supervised by Ming-Bo Wang of CSIRO)

Plant resistance to bacterial and fungal pathogens by RNAi

James Kenneth Charles Scifleet, (co-supervised by Andrew Aquiliny)

Function of arsI and arsP in an arsenic-resistance operon

MSc Research

Rachel Caldwell (co-supervised by Yanxia Lin)

DNA sequence length relationships between different gene regions

Sam Abraham (co-supervised by Jim Chin of NSW Ag)

Molecular approaches to analyse stress inducing probiotic and pathogen interactions

Kiran Sarfaraz (co-supervised by Ming-Bo Wang of CSIRO)

Gene silencing and polyploidy of plants

Suggested Topics for Future Students

Arsenic resistance mechanism in microbes and plants

RNA silencing and plant-microbe interaction

Bioinformatics of gene expression and evolution

Medicinal fungi and plants

Abbreviated CV

Academic Degrees

PhD: 1987, Australian National University (ANU)

MSc: 1981, Academia Sinica (Beijing Institute of Botany)

BSc: 1978, Nankai University

Academic Appointments

Senior Lecturer, 2000-present, School of Biological Sciences, University of Wollongong (UoW) 

Plant Molecular Biology Unit Co-ordinator, 1999-2006, Commonwealth Smart Foods Key Centre of Teaching and Research at UoW 

Lecturer, 1995-1999, Department of Biological Sciences, UoW 

Research Scientist/Senior Research Scientist 1990-1994, CSIRO Division of Plant Industry

Postdoctoral Fellow, 1988-1990, Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia

Visiting Fellow, 1987-1988, CSIRO Division of Plant Industry and RSBS, ANU 

Postdoctoral Fellow, 1987-1988, Beijing Institute of Botany, Academia Sinica

Adjunct Research Professor, 2003-present, Institute of Medicinal Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Medical Science

Adjunct Professor, 1995-2006, College of Life Sciences, Nankai University, China

Adjunct Research Professor, 1995-1999, Institute of Developmental Biology, Academia Sinica

Visiting Scientist, 1996, School of Biological Sciences, University of Nottingham, UK

Visiting Investigator, 2001, Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, USA

Last reviewed: 25 June, 2008