News
Miller Lab awarded seed funds for COVID-19 research by the ISU Office of Vice President for Research.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Carino! Awarded her Ph.D. in Genetics & Genomics for her research in the Miller Lab! Dissertation: "Decoding the translation initiation mechanism of maize chlorotic mottle virus." More...
Know your scientist: Weihui Xu, PhD, Assistant Scientist II, joined the Miller Lab last fall to work on engineering plant viruses as aphid-transmissible "gene therapy vectors" for plants. Weihui saw the light and joined the world of plant virology after many years investigating plant-powdery mildew interactions in the lab of Roger Wise.
Farewell Surapathrudu Kanakala! We miss you. After two years as a postdoc engineering viruses as "gene therapy" vectors for maize plants, Surya has moved on to the lab of Anna Whitfield at North Carolina State University to investigate insect transmission of maize viruses. We look forward to your exciting discoveries Surya!
Miller Lab presents discoveries at the American Society for Virology
Farewell Havva Ilbagi, visiting professor from Turkey, discoverer of viruses!
Visiting student Marie-Dominique Jolivet awarded her MS degree by the University of Bordeaux.
Thank you to the many Miller lab scientists who contributed to this paper over many years: plant viral sequence in the 3' untranslated region stimulates translation in mammals.
Visiting Borlaug Fellow, Paul Kuria, Ph.D. joins our Lab to investigate maize lethal necrosis disease. Read more...
Congratulations to Melissa Sheber for earning her BS and MS in Biochemistry for her research in the Miller Lab!
Graduate student Liz Carino was awarded 2nd Place poster at the Midwest Section of the American Society for Plant Biology meeting. Read more...
Allen Miller was named a Fellow of the AAAS for “distinguished contributions to the field of plant virology, particularly in the areas of genome organizations, RNA translation, replication and movement mechanisms, and vector interactions.” Read more...
Allen Miller and Steve Whitham, professors of Plant Pathology & Microbiology are part of a multi-institutional team, that was awarded $10.3 million from DARPA. This high-risk program asks researchers to engineer plant viruses to deliver novel genes, via insect vectors of the viruses, that will aid crop plants during times of stress. Read more...
Allen Miller had the privilege of speaking at the Timothy Hall Memorial Symposium honoring his PhD advisor. Read more...
The Miller and Whitham labs seek postdocs to engineer insect-transmitted plant viruses as expression vectors. Read more...
We ground up soybean aphids from the Midwest and China, Illumina sequenced the RNA, and discovered that aphid viruses are ubiquitous. Ranging from viruses found in other aphids and in honey bees, to plant viruses vectored by the aphid, to viruses representing whole new families, so novel we
Many plant viruses have very specific interactions with aphid vectors, the "mosquitoes" of the plant world, and Juliette Doumayrou and Melissa Sheber found a key to virus entry into its aphid vector. Read more...
Viruses contribute to the widespread decline in honey bee health. Postdoc Jimena Carrillo-Tripp published a key paper revealing which viruses do better than others in mixed infections, and suggesting that viruses cooperate to make bees even sicker. Read more...
A collaboration with bioinformaticist Andrew Firth, Cambridge Univ, and plant virologist Véronique Ziegler-Graff, Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes, Strasbourg, where Allen Miller worked in 2012-2013, yielded the discovery of an important new gene in the luteovirus family of plant viruses. Read more...