More Information

Professor Bassham received her B.Sc. (Honours) in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham, England and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Warwick, England. Dr. Bassham completed a post-doctoral appointment at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, and joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 2001. In 2013, Dr. Bassham was chosen as the first Walter E. and Helen Parke Loomis Professor of Plant Physiology in GDCB. In 2020 she was named a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists and in 2021 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research Description

My research interests focus on understanding the function and regulation of vacuolar autophagy in plant abiotic stress responses. Autophagy is a pathway for uptake of proteins, protein aggregates, other macromolecules, and organelles into the vacuole for degradation during environmental stress and senescence. Plants defective in this pathway are more sensitive to stress conditions and show premature leaf senescence. We are studying the effects of loss or increase in autophagy on plant stress tolerance, the transcriptional regulation of auotphagy-related genes, and the signaling pathways involved in its activation. We are also interested in the substrate specificity of autophagic degradation and have identified an autophagy-related pathway that functions in RNA salvage.