Image: Congratulations to Bill Ricci, who was awarded the first annual Paper of the Year Award for 2019! The paper nominated is "Widespread long-range cis-regulatory elements in the maize genome," which was published in Nature Plants (see reference below), the top journal in the plant molecular sciences with an impact factor over 13.3. It addresses the critically important question of how plant genes are regulated. The Plant Biology Graduate Student Paper of the Year Award is meant to highlight the research accomplishments of PBIO graduate students and to encourage timely publication of student research. This award recognizes a PBIO student who publishes a paper judged to have had the greatest impact in advancing our knowledge of plant or fungal biology that year. Ricci, W. A., Z. Lu, L. Ji, A. P. Marand, C. L. Ethridge, N. G. Murphy, J. M. Noshay, M. Galli, M. K. Mejia-Guerra, M. Colome-Tatche, F. Johannes, M. J. Rowley, V. G. Corces, J. Zhai, M. J. Scanlon, E. S. Buckler, A. Gallavotti, N. M. Springer, R. J. Schmitz and X. Zhang (2019). "Widespread long-range cis-regulatory elements in the maize genome." Nat Plants 5(12): 1237-1249. Way to go, Bill!
