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Welcome
to the
Weinstain Lab

Our goal is to establish efficient molecular tools for studying plants development and adaptive growth. In particular, we aim to develop and deploy novel molecular tools to map the dynamics of plant hormones and unveil their role in signaling regulation. We are located in the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at Tel-Aviv University.

Research

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The research in Roy Weinstain's Lab is diverse and highly multidisciplinary. This is well reflected in the various backgrounds of our team members, which include biologists, chemists, and imaging experts. Our main interest is gaining a comprehensive understanding of molecular mechanisms involved in plants development and adaptive growth. We integrate a wide variety of techniques from multiple disciplines, including molecular design, organic synthesis, molecular biology, cell biology, biochemistry, and imaging.
We keep an open mind toward opportunities and actively pursue them, whenever possible.

Latest Publications

Porphyrin as a versatile visible-light-activatable organic/metal hybrid photoremovable protecting group

Photoremovable protecting groups (PPGs) represent one of the main contemporary implementations of photochemistry in diverse fields of research and practical applications. For the past half century, organic and metal-complex PPGs were considered mutually exclusive classes, each of which provided unique sets of physical and chemical properties thanks to their distinctive structures. Here, we introduce the meso-methylporphyrin group as a prototype hybrid-class PPG that unites traditionally exclusive elements of organic and metal-complex PPGs within a single structure. We show that the porphyrin scaffold allows extensive modularity by functional separation of the metal-binding chromophore and up to four sites of leaving group release. The insertion of metal ions can be used to tune their spectroscopic, photochemical, and biological properties. We provide a detailed description of the photoreaction mechanism studied by steady-state and transient absorption spectroscopies and quantum-chemical calculations. Our approach applied herein could facilitate access to a hitherto untapped chemical space of potential PPG scaffolds.

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