University of Missouri

Biography

Marc Libault is a professor in the Division of Plant Science and Technology and a member of the Interdisciplinary Plant Group (IPG) at Mizzou. He received his PhD degree in 2004 from the University of Paris-Sud in Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology working on the HP1-like protein in Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2005, he joined Dr. Gary Stacey’s laboratory at the University of Missouri-Columbia as a post-doctoral associate to study the symbiotic interaction between the soybean root and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Rhizobia. In 2011, as a faculty at the University of Oklahoma,

Libault developed a system biology approach on the root hair cell, a unique plant root cell type involved in the uptake of water and nutrients from the soil and the first cell infected by Rhizobia in legume plants. In 2018, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and pioneered the field of plant single-nucleus technologies to analyze the differential use of the genomic information between plant cells. As faculty, he is expanding the use of plant single-nucleus biology to study various species and stresses including legumes to study their symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.