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Mae Mercado

@maemercado.bsky.social

PhD Candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying maize rubisco activase and photosynthesis evolution in grasses. 2025 Plantae Fellow From 🇵🇭

126 Posts318 Follower539 Folgt
Mae Mercado@maemercado.bsky.social · 2w ago

Been receiving feedback on all the events that the ASPB Early Career Plant Scientists Section has done at #PlantBio2026 and all of them are really heart warming. I've missed a couple of meals because I get nervous doing the 3MT on the plenary but every event for early careers have been worth it.

Mae Mercado@maemercado.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Probably a reach here but I'm looking for someone (early career maybe) who would be willing to mentor me as I navigate the post-PhD life. I feel lost on a lot of things and would be grateful to bounce ideas and experiences with someone who's been through a couple of years post-PhD. 😭

Mae Mercado@maemercado.bsky.social · 5mo ago

To academics out here who still see this, what do you do when you lose the joy of doing science? If you are a PI or a supervisor, what do you when you see your grad student/postdoc spiral and lose their joy and passion? Asking for me. 😅

Chenxin Li, PhD@chenxinli2.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Please share! I'm looking for a postdoc. The position is to lead one of the following projects: 1) regulation of plant specialized metabolism by cell fate, or 2) foliar embryogenesis in the succulent plant Kalanchoe. Learn more abt projects: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/res...

Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.

cxli233.github.io