SEB Bulletin January 2006 - The Royal Society welcomes two New Plant Scientists
Congratulations to Professor Alastair Fitter (York) and Jim Barber (Imperial) who were recently made fellows of the Royal Society. Alastair has been a long-standing member of the SEB for many years and Jim is making the first contribution to our new ‘Future Perspectives’ series in the SEB Bulletin this month as well as organising a session at the Photosynthesis Congress 2007.
Alastair Fitter describes himself as a “below-ground ecologist”. He is distinguished for his contribution to that normally-unseen half of the natural environment the portion that resides in the soil and which involves complex interactions between plants, animals and microbes. Alastair's particular contributions have been in the area of understanding the structure and function of plant root systems. Using an architectural approach, Alastair demonstrated that root system development can realistically be evaluated in natural soil only where distinctive branching patterns determine the efficiency of with which plants acquire nutrients from poorly mobile resources in the soil. It is, however, mainly for his studies on plant-mycorrhizal interactions that Alastair is best known. In elegant field studies, he showed, for the first time under natural conditions, that colonisation by mycorrhizal fungi is essential for the survival of some species.
Biological responses to environmental factors involved in global change have become an important part of these studies. Poking his head above ground, Alastair used a unique long-term data set on first flowering dates of over 500 British plant species, collected by his father the renowned author and naturalist RSR Fitter - over nearly 50 years. He showed that almost all species were sensitive to temperature, but with a complex response in which warm autumns delayed and warm springs advanced flowering. In the 1990s, the warmest decade on record, flowering time advanced by a remarkable two weeks in as many as 200 species in the British flora. The analysis of these data was the most comprehensive documentation of the biological response of any group of organisms to climate change to date.
Alastair Fitter has spent nearly all of his scientific life at the University of York. He arrived as a lecturer - merely as Mr Fitter, since his Liverpool Ph.D. was yet to be awarded in 1972. He served as Head of the Biology Department from 1997 to 2004 a period that witnessed immense expansion, success and change. He is now Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at York. Among many other honours, he has recently served as President of the British Ecological Society and is currently Director of the UK Population Biology Network.
More widely, Alastair has had a long-standing and continuing commitment to the dissemination of science to a wider public through authoritative and highly readable field guides. My battered 1974 edition of The Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe has accompanied me on all countryside walks in the UK over the last three decades. The Wild Flowers of the British Isles (2003) is a wonderful and accessible update.
Dale Sanders
University of York
Jim Barber’s election to the Royal Society recognises his outstanding contributions to photosynthesis research, particularly to the understanding of the structural and functional properties of photosystem (PS) II and PSI and the chloroplast thylakoid membrane in which these dynamic molecular machines are embedded.
At Wales UC Swansea, Jim gained his BSc Hons in Chemistry (1964), and then at the University of East Anglia, his MSc (1965) and PhD (1967) in Biophysics. He worked on aspects of ion transport with the famous physicist-turned-biologist, Prof. Jack Dainty who said that Jim was his best-ever PhD student. Then Jim was a Unilever Biochemical Society Fellow at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, with Prof Duysens.
Jim returned to London to Imperial College in 1968 staying there ever since, first as Lecturer, then Professor in Plant Physiology in 1979 and the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry from 1990 onwards. Along the way he has been showered with honours including election to Academia Europaea (1989), an Honorary Doctorate, University of Stockholm (1992), election as a foreign member to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (2003) and the award of the most prestigious medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Flintoff Medal (2002).
Jim’s initial research at Imperial College provided insights into the function of PSII, as well as the molecular organisation of both PSII and PSI within stacked and unstacked domains of plant thylakoid membranes. Then in the early eighties, Jim and Bertil Andersson demonstrated the molecular basis of PSII inactivation in high light. By now Jim was completely hooked on understanding how PSII utilises solar energy to split water into oxygen and reducing equivalents, which underpins all life on our planet: Jim says that the creation of PSII represents “the big bang of biological evolution”.
From 1986, Jim and his students focussed on isolating pure PSII fractions and large antenna/reaction centre supercomplexes of PSII and PSI from various prokaryotes and plants. Using electron microscopy, their single particle analyses revealed beautiful rings or bands of assorted light-harvesting antenna around reaction centres and 2-D em provided first insights into the arrangements of the transmembrane helices of PSII reaction centre proteins and the first glimpses of chlorophylls and other cofactors.
Finally, together with So Iwata also at Imperial College, Jim’s dream was realised in 2004, when they revealed the inner catalytic water splitting catalytic centre of PSII by a refined Xray structure, thereby providing a framework to unravel the molecular mechanism of the unique PSII chemistry.
Jim’s friends and the photosynthesis community are delighted by his election to the Royal Society. He is renowned for his passionate enthusiasm for cutting-edge photosynthesis research and ardent zeal for whatever he undertakes, mostly science, but also house renovations and sailing. Jim’s wife, Lyn, has assisted him in the lab or office ever since Jim was a MSc student: Jim and Lyn are a splendid team! Recently his three young grandchildren who also enjoyed the “family friendly” Royal Society inauguration ceremony helped drown the President’s speech.
Jan Anderson
The Australian National University