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• W2913135771 abstract "Gerd Jürgens is Professor of Developmental Genetics at the Center for Plant Molecular Biology (ZMBP) at the University of Tübingen, and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany. He earned his PhD in zoology from the University of Freiburg, did a postdoc with Janni Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus at the EMBL in Heidelberg, then moved with Janni to the University of Tübingen to work on Drosophila development for several more years before he started his research on Arabidopsis development in Tübingen and Munich. His research has mainly addressed two topics — pattern formation in early embryogenesis and membrane traffic, especially during cytokinesis. What turned you on to biology in the first place? Biology was not my first choice. I had started to study mathematics and physics when reading the 1964 edition of Jim Watson's book Molecular Biology of the Gene won me over to biology, at least to the then novel and exciting developments in molecular genetics. At that time, I had no feeling for traditional biology and tried to get around those courses in my studies. Later on, during my PhD project in Drosophila developmental genetics, I began to appreciate the beauty of biological complexity. Do you have a favourite paper? Herman Muller's lengthy paper entitled “Further studies on the nature and causes of gene mutation”, which was published in the Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Genetics held in Ithaca, NY in 1932. No easy read but worth being read. It was a real eye opener, demonstrating how far good reasoning can take you when you lack direct molecular evidence. If you are not put off by the old-fashioned terminology (antimorphs, neomorphs and the like) you really learn how to infer from the biological consequences of mutated gene function what the normal role of the affected gene might be. Do you have a scientific hero? Gregor Mendel, of course, and the early geneticists Alfred Sturtevant and Herman Muller, each for different reasons, although they all explored uncharted territory in ingenious ways. I like to discuss Mendel's paper with students in genetics courses for its elegance and beauty in experimental setup, interpretation of data and, voilà, presentation. Sturtevant established the procedure of genetic mapping by recombination frequencies, and Muller pioneered mutation research, working on both experimental mutagenesis and the organismic consequences of mutant alleles. This trio stands for the foundation of genetics. What is the best advice you’ve been given? To secure a tenured position before you embark on a scientific excursion into uncharted territory, which was given to me by José Campos-Ortega, my postdoctoral mentor at Freiburg University, in 1978. But his advice fell on deaf ears. At that time, I started to consider leaving Drosophila for Arabidopsis, a flowering plant unbeknownst to most people (“Ara what?”). It actually took another eight years or so to make the change — but I was still without a secure position, living on a DFG research fellowship. In retrospect, I was just lucky that the transition was successful. Have you ever regretted switching to plant biology? Not really, although I had a slow start. With Arabidopsis being so much slower and me starting from scratch, I continued to work on Drosophila in parallel for about five years, mostly in collaboration with Detlef Weigel and Steve Cohen, then a PhD student and a postdoc in Herbert Jäckle's group in Tübingen and Munich, respectively. The change from Drosophila to Arabidopsis was a déjà vu because I had left Bacillus subtilis bacteriophage SP2 for Drosophila in 1972 in order to analyse development from a genetics vantage point, which expanded the duration of an experiment from 1 day to 4 weeks (2 generations). And the change to Arabidopsis was a real challenge to my patience, with the results of an experiment coming in only three months after its start. However, switching to plant biology was quite rewarding because at that time, so little was known about pattern formation during embryogenesis (and development in general) and molecular cell biology. And there is still a lot to discover in terms of molecular mechanisms of these processes. What do you see as the greatest potential plant biology has to offer? Plants are the ultimate alternative of multicellular life form to animals, having diverged from non-plant organisms at the eukaryotic single-cell stage of evolution some 1.5 billion years ago. You can easily imagine that cellular life had not been optimised at that time and different branches of eukaryotic life forms evolved in different directions. One case-in-point is cytokinesis, which is radically different in land plants as compared to all non-plant organisms, although you might presume that the earliest single-celled eukaryotes had to establish mechanisms of cell division. More generally speaking, it will be quite rewarding to analyse how plants as sessile life forms cope with stress (pathogens, heat, drought, salinity, neighbours) and have evolved (yet poorly understood) mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity, which might help plants to adapt to the changing climate. What do you think are the big questions to be answered next in your field? Biology at large addresses two different questions regarding life or its subsystems: (1) How does it work? (2) How did it come to work? The former question addresses molecular mechanisms, the latter their evolutionary contingency. Experimental attitudes have changed a lot over the past twenty years or so. It has become ever easier to amass large collections of data (‘age of -omics’) and more difficult or time consuming to actually establish causal relationships on a molecular-mechanistic level. The mechanistic explanation requires a lot more in terms of molecular activities and interactions on an almost atomic level (‘how is specificity generated?’). The good thing is that the ‘-omics’ approach is starting to revolutionise areas of traditional biology such as ecology and organismic interactions by, hopefully, identifying genes underlying complex traits and behaviours. Identifying molecular mechanisms underlying complex biological processes is clearly one of the biggest challenges in contemporary biology. The other big question is how to generate biological specificity by way of molecular interaction. How can we explain that two closely related proteins have different biological activities? This question is also at the heart of biological complexity. Addressing this question requires more biochemical and structural-biological analysis than has been done, and thus probably more collaboration between cell biologists and developmental biologists on one hand and biochemists and structural biologists on the other. What advice would you offer someone wondering whether to start a career in biology? My general advice would be to do what you enjoy, without paying (too much) attention to your job perspectives. If you love biology, do it, but don't walk down the trodden path." @default.
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• W2913135771 title "Gerd Jürgens" @default.
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