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J. Clark Lagarias
Professor

Email: jclagarias@ucdavis.edu
Phone:(530) 752-1865

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 2001.
Paul K. and Ruth R. Stumpf Professor of Plant Biochemistry, 1999-2006.
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley - Chemistry, 1979.
B.A., University of California, Berkeley - Botany and Chemistry, 1975.
Group Page
Principal Research Interests
Analysis of the biochemical mechanisms underlying light-mediated plant growth and development. Structure-function studies on the plant photoreceptor phytochrome. Biochemistry of linear tetrapyrrole metabolic enzymes. Directed evolution of phytochromes, phycobiliproteins and bilin reductases. Development of phytochrome-based fluorescent probes.
Representative Publications

Su Y-S. and Lagarias JC (2007) Light independent phytochrome signaling mediated by dominant GAF-domain tyrosine mutants of Arabidopsis phytochromes in transgenic plants, Plant Cell (USA) 19, 2124–2139.

Tu SL, Rockwell NC, Lagarias, JC and Fisher AJ (2007). Insight into the radical mechanism of phycocyanobilin:ferredoxin oxidoreductase (PcyA) revealed by x-ray crystallography and biochemical analysis. Biochemistry 46, 1484-1494.

Miller AE, Fischer AJ, Laurence T, Hollars C, Saykally R, Lagarias JC and Huser T (2006) Single molecule dynamics of phytochrome-bound fluorophores probed by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103, 11136-11141.

Rockwell NC, Su Y-S and Lagarias JC (2006) Phytochrome structure and signaling mechanisms. Annual Review of Plant Biology 57, 837-858.

Tu S-L, Sughrue WL, Britt RD and Lagarias JC (2006) A Catalytic Histidine-Aspartate Pair in Exo-Vinyl Reduction of Biliverdin by Phycocyanobilin:Ferredoxin Oxidoreductase (PcyA). Journal of Biological Chemistry 281, 3127-3136.

Fischer AJ, Rockwell NC, Jang A, Ernst L, Waggoner A, Duan Y, Lei H-X and Lagarias JC (2005) Multiple roles of a conserved GAF domain tyrosine residue in cyanobacterial and plant phytochromes. Biochemistry 44, 15203-15215.