2025 George Rédei Seed Stock Award

Written By Joanna Friesner, NAASC Executive Director

Co-awardees:

  • Dr. Ivan Radin, University of Minnesota, St. Paul

  • Dr. Elizabeth Haswell

Contributed 124 seed stocks to the ABRC in 2024.

The 2025 co-awardees are Dr. Ivan Radin of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul and Dr. Elizabeth Haswell (formerly of Washington University in St. Louis) for their contribution of 124 seed stocks to the ABRC. We thank Dr. Radin and Dr. Haswell, on behalf of the community, for their generous contribution to the ABRC repository!

The North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC) and the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) established the George Rédei Seed Stock Award in 2023 to recognize the Arabidopsis scientist that has donated the most seed stocks to ABRC the previous year. The Award is named after Dr. George Rédei, a founder of Arabidopsis as the reference flowering plant.

Visit the NAASC Rédei webpage to learn more about George Rédei and his key roles in establishing Arabidopsis thaliana as the primary molecular plant biology model organism.

Ivan Radin & Liz Haswell:

One of the fundamental truths in research is that an answer is never final. Knowledge and resources created by previous generations of scientists are continuously used in novel ways and understood in new contexts. We build libraries to preserve accumulated knowledge, but safeguarding the resources for the next generations, especially live materials, is far more challenging. The stock centers like the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC), the European Arabidopsis Stock Center (NASC), the Chlamydomonas Resource Center, or the Moss Stock Center play a crucial role in collecting, propagating, and distributing invaluable materials that help drive the progress of plant research. As such, it is of utmost importance for the plant community to support and promote these centers and their work.

With that in mind, it was an easy decision to donate all available Arabidopsis lines the Haswell lab generated and published over 16 years at Washington University in St. Louis to the ABRC. The research focus of the Haswell lab was plant mechanosensitive ion channels, a group of proteins that are proposed to mediate the perception of mechanical forces in various membranes of plant cells. Initially, the lab focused on two plastidial mechanosensitive channels in Arabidopsis, MSL2 and MSL3, but later on, expanded to include mechanosensitive channels in the mitochondrial, plasma, vacuolar, and ER membranes. In 2023, when Liz decided to close her laboratory, we submitted all available published Arabidopsis lines not previously submitted to ABRC. We hope that these seed stocks (131 in total) will continue to be useful for the plant community and drive Arabidopsis research forward. 

The Haswell lab legacy is continued by the Radin lab at the University of Minnesota, which studies plant mechanosensing but with an evolutionary twist. By using multiple model systems (Arabidopsis, the moss Physcomitrium, and the green alga Chlamydomonas), we want to understand how organellar mechanosensing evolved over the past 1.5 billion years of green lineage evolution. The Radin lab is now also safeguarding the large and valuable collections (seeds, plasmids, etc.) generated by the Haswell lab. We remain committed to supporting plant stock centers and are grateful for the great work they do. As such, we are deeply honored by this award and very grateful to ABRC & NAASC. 

Joanna Friesner, NAASC Executive Director

Current Position: Executive Director, North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC)

Education: PhD in Genetics, University of California, Davis

I completed a PhD in Genetics at UC Davis, USA, where I conducted early research into mechanisms of DNA double-strand break repair in Arabidopsis thaliana. Following this (2006) I began supporting the Arabidopsis community first as the Coordinator of the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC), and then as the Executive Director of the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC), a non-profit charity registered in the US. Since 2006, I have led and supported various community activities via my support of the elected members of NAASC including serving as lead organizer for seven International Conferences on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR), and developing and implementing numerous NAASC activities (e.g., the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium, workshops, seminars, publications.) Supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the plant sciences has long been a key NAASC objective, with increased focus in the last 8 years, particularly due to support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF*) via the award “Research Coordination Network: Arabidopsis Research and Training for the 21st Century (ART-21)”.  NAASC has enabled participation in ICARs and other activities by about 100 members of under-represented groups in US STEM and 400+ early career researchers; organized more than a dozen professional and career development workshops, and led the writing of several publications, including this most recent guide on broadening impacts of plant science. Several years ago, I co-founded (with NAASC members Jennifer Nemhauser and Liz Haswell) the DiversifyPlantSci database (https://rdale1.shinyapps.io/diversifyplantsci/) to highlight diversity in the plant sciences community and to further increase diversity and inclusion. Recently I led organization of the first online ICAR (ICAR 2021-Virtual), postponed from 2020-Seattle due to Covid-19, and work with NAASC to develop plans for new activities to support the Arabidopsis community. I am now planning ICAR 2024-UC San Diego.

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