Dr. Alex Gao receives 2026 Award for Outstanding Lecture/Presentation - MD Program

Dr. Long receives the Prize in recognition of her pioneering contributions to our understanding of plant–microbe symbiosis, particularly the molecular interactions between legumes and rhizobia.

A paper in Nature Communications by Gao lab members (Simone Evans, Collin Chiu) with collaborators at Stanford and MIT shows how two distinct bacterial immune sensors use unexpected molecular mechanisms to detect the DNA packaging motor of bacterial viruses.