Undergraduate research experiences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields are championed for promoting students’ personal and professional development. Mentorship is an integral part of undergraduate research, as effective mentorship maximizes the benefits undergraduates realize from participating in research. Yet almost no research examines instances in which mentoring is less effective or even problematic, even though prior research on mentoring in workplace settings suggests negative mentoring experiences are common. Here, we report the results of a qualitative study to define and characterize negative mentoring experiences of undergraduate life science researchers. Undergraduate researchers in our study reported seven major ways they experienced negative mentoring: absenteeism, abuse of power, interpersonal mismatch, lack of career support, lack of psychosocial support, misaligned expectations, and unequal treatment. They described some of these experiences as the result of absence of positive mentoring behavior and others as actively harmful behavior, both of which they perceive as detrimental to their psychosocial and career development. Our results are useful to mentors for reflecting on ways their behaviors might be perceived as harmful or unhelpful. These findings can also serve as a foundation for future research aimed at examining the prevalence and impact of negative mentoring experiences in undergraduate research.

A characterization of the negative mentoring doctoral students experience during their graduate research is presented. Students attributed their negative mentoring experiences to interacting factors at multiple levels of the academic research system, which they perceived as harmful to their development.

Leaf osmotic adjustment by the active accrual of compatible organic solutes (e.g., sucrose) contributes to drought tolerance throughout the plant kingdom. In Populus tremula x alba, PtaSUT4 encodes a tonoplast sucrose-proton symporter whose down-regulation by chronic mild drought or transgenic manipulation is known to increase leaf sucrose and turgor. While this may constitute a single drought tolerance mechanism, we now report that other adjustments which can occur during a worsening water deficit are damped when PtaSUT4 is constitutively down-regulated. Specifically, we report that starch use and leaf relative water content (RWC) dynamics were compromised when plants with constitutively down-regulated PtaSUT4 were subjected to a water deficit. Leaf RWC decreased more in wild type and vector control lines than in transgenic PtaSUT4-RNAi or CRISPR-knockout (KO) lines during the onset of an acute water deficit, even though leaf water loss was the same in all lines. The control line RWC decrease was accompanied by increased PtaSUT4 transcript levels and a mobilization of sucrose from the mesophyll-enriched leaf lamina into the midvein. The findings suggest that changes in SUT4 expression can increase turgor or decrease RWC as different tolerance mechanisms to reduced water availability. Evidence is presented that PtaSUT4-mediated sucrose partitioning between vacuole and cytosol is important not only for overall sucrose abundance and turgor, but also for reactive oxygen species (ROS) and antioxidant dynamics. Interestingly, the reduced capacity for accelerated starch breakdown under worsening water-deficit conditions was correlated with reduced ROS in the RNAi and KO lines. A role for PtaSUT4 in the orchestration of ROS, antioxidant, starch utilization and RWC dynamics during water stress, and its importance in trees especially, with their high hydraulic resistances, is considered.