Anna Stepanova

About

Anna Stepanova is a Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at North Carolina State University, serving on the GGA Executive Committee. Her research focuses on understanding how plants adapt to their environment through hormonal regulation, particularly the roles of auxin and ethylene in phenotypic plasticity and root growth. Her work has uncovered previously unknown ethylene-mediated regulation of auxin biosynthesis and explores the mechanisms of ethylene signal transduction, hormone pathway crosstalk, and translational regulation of hormone responses. She employs a combination of classical and molecular genetics, cell biology, genomics, and synthetic biology techniques in Arabidopsis and tomato to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying plant adaptation and phenotypic plasticity. Her research aims to elucidate how plants integrate developmental programs with environmental signals to produce appropriate responses, utilizing advanced biotechnological tools such as CRISPR-based synthetic genetic devices to manipulate hormone expression with precision. Her contributions include developing innovative approaches to study gene-specific translation regulation, which has the potential to transform understanding of gene expression control in plants and beyond.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Biology
• Ecology
• Biochemistry
• Data Mining
• Botany
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering

Selected publications

• To Fight or to Grow: The Balancing Role of Ethylene in Plant Abiotic Stress Responses

  Plants · 2021 · 203 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Plants often live in adverse environmental conditions and are exposed to various stresses, such as heat, cold, heavy metals, salt, radiation, poor lighting, nutrient deficiency, drought, or flooding. To adapt to unfavorable environments, plants have evolved specialized molecular mechanisms that serve to balance the trade-off between abiotic stress responses and growth. These mechanisms enable plants to continue to develop and reproduce even under adverse conditions. Ethylene, as a key growth reg…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Auxin Interactions with Other Hormones in Plant Development

  Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology · 2021 · 139 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Auxin is a crucial growth regulator that governs plant development and responses to environmental perturbations. It functions at the heart of many developmental processes, from embryogenesis to organ senescence, and is key to plant interactions with the environment, including responses to biotic and abiotic stimuli. As remarkable as auxin is, it does not act alone, but rather solicits the help of, or is solicited by, other endogenous signals, including the plant hormones abscisic acid, brassinos…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Vision, challenges and opportunities for a Plant Cell Atlas

  eLife · 2021 · 68 citations

  Note: for full list of Plant Cell Atlas Consortium, see publication (p17). With growing populations and pressing environmental problems, future economies will be increasingly plant-based. Now is the time to reimagine plant science as a critical component of fundamental science, agriculture, environmental stewardship, energy, technology and healthcare. This effort requires a conceptual and technological framework to identify and map all cell types, and to comprehensively annotate the localization…

  DOI

• Deciphering the molecular basis of tissue-specific gene expression in plants: Can synthetic biology help?

  Current Opinion in Plant Biology · 2022-06-11 · 59 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Arabidopsis as a model for translational research

  The Plant Cell · 2024-02-27 · 52 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Arabidopsis thaliana is currently the most-studied plant species on earth, with an unprecedented number of genetic, genomic, and molecular resources having been generated in this plant model. In the era of translating foundational discoveries to crops and beyond, we aimed to highlight the utility and challenges of using Arabidopsis as a reference for applied plant biology research, agricultural innovation, biotechnology, and medicine. We hope that this review will inspire the next generation of…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Tailoring hormone responses in plants via synthetic signal integration devices

  NSF · $1.3M · 2018–2026

• PAPM-EAGER: Single-locus multi-hormone reporters for comprehensive plant phenotyping: a synthetic-biology approach.

  NSF · $300k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• José M. Alonso

  North Carolina State University

  83 shared

• Joseph R. Ecker

  Salk Institute for Biological Studies

  42 shared

• Roberto Solano

  Centro Nacional de Biotecnología

  17 shared

• Ellen Wisman

  Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research

  16 shared

• Frederick M. Ausubel

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  16 shared

• Simone Ferrari

  Sapienza University of Rome

  16 shared

• Javier Brumós

  Universitat Politècnica de València

  14 shared

• Jeonga Yun

  11 shared

Labs

• Plant and Microbial BiologyPI

Education

• PhD, Biology

  University of Pennsylvania

  2001

• BS, Biology

  University of Nevada Reno

  1995

• BS/MS, Biology

  N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod

  1995

Awards & honors

• CAREER: Tailoring hormone responses in plants via synthetic…
• EAGER: TRTech-PGR: New Methods to Study Gene-specific Transl…
• Identification of Translational Hormone-Response Gene Networ…

Similar researchers at North Carolina State University

• William Thompsonh-62
• JoAnn Burkholderh-61
• Linda Hanley-Bowdoinh-55