Dr. Lior Tal

Lior Tal is a senior lecturer in the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security.  She was trained as an undergrad in Plant sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture, the Hebrew University. She received a masters in Plant genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a PhD in Plant Developmental Genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  

Plants employ complex and intertwining signaling cascades, driven by chemical signals to translate and adapt to environmental changes. Local heterogeneities in water and nutrient availability, sudden changes in temperature, light or other stresses trigger and result in changes in growth. These developmental responses occur in a timely manner and involve swift changes in cellular protein abundance. Protein stability is a key element in the regulation of protein abundance, making the plant ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) regulatory function fundamental to plant response signals. We study the regulatory role of the UPS in plant signaling cascades and seek to uncover the molecular mechanisms that rapidly fine-tune protein abundance in plant cells in response to stress.  

1. Tal, L., Palayam, M., Ron, M., Young, A., Britt, A., & Shabek, N. (2022). A conformational switch in the SCF-D3/MAX2 ubiquitin ligase facilitates strigolactone signalling. Nature Plants, 8(5), 561-573. 

2. Meir, Z., Aviezer, I., Chongloi, G.L., Ben-Kiki, O., Bronstein, R., Mukamel, Z., Keren-Shaul, H., Jaitin, D., Tal, L., Shalev-Schlosser, G. and Harel, T.H. and Eshed, Y. 2021. Dissection of floral transition by single-meristem transcriptomes at high temporal resolution. Nature Plants, 7(6), pp.800-813. 

3. Hendelman, A., Zebell, S., Rodriguez-Leal, D., Dukler, N., Robitaille, G., Wu, X., Kostyun, J., Tal, L., Wang, P., Bartlett, M.E., Eshed, Y., Efroni, I. and Lippman, Z. B. 2021. Conserved pleiotropy of an ancient plant homeobox gene uncovered by cis-regulatory dissection. Cell, 184(7), pp.1724-1739. 

4. Palayam, M., Ganapathy, J., Guercio, A. M., Tal, L., Deck, S. L., & Shabek, N. 2021. Structural insights into photoactivation of plant Cryptochrome-2. Communications biology, 4(1), 1-11. 

5. Tal, L., Gil, M.X.A., Guercio, A.M. and Shabek, N., 2020. Structural aspects of plant hormone signal perception and regulation by ubiquitin ligases. Plant Physiology, 182(4), pp.1537-1544. 

6. Tal, L., Friedlander, G., Gilboa, N.S., Unger, T., Gilad, S. and Eshed, Y., 2017. Coordination of meristem doming and the floral transition by late termination, a kelch repeat protein. The Plant Cell, 29(4), pp.681-696.