SEB Bulletin March 2007
Special Lectures
Bidder Lecture: Alison Smith (John Innes Centre, Norwich)
How Plants Survive the Night
Alison Smith graduated in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1975, then completed a PhD in plant biochemistry with Professor Tom ap Rees in the Plant Sciences Department. After postdoctoral research in the Universities of Düsseldorf, Leeds and East Anglia, she took a post at the John Innes Centre where she's been ever since.
Alison's research is on primary carbohydrate metabolism in plants. Initially she and her colleagues used pea mutants and transgenic potatoes to understand how starch granules are synthesised, and produced some weird and wonderful starches in the process. In the late 1990s she succumbed to the lure of Arabidopsis, and together with close collaborators Steve Smith (no relation!) in the University of Perth and Sam Zeeman at the ETH in Zurich she has used forward and reverse genetics to study the pathway of starch metabolism in leaves. This has been a fruitful exercise, uncovering all sorts of new and surprising complexity and essentially re-writing the “textbook” view of this process. The focus is now on understanding the control of the process of starch breakdown in leaves at night, and how this is integrated with growth and carbon balance in the plant as a whole.
Now that models are emerging from her research on Arabidopsis, Alison is also returning to her “roots” in crop research. In collaboration with Kay Denyer at the John Innes Centre, her lab is applying information from Arabidopsis and forward and reverse genetic approaches to study starch synthesis and degradation in barley and wheat seeds.
Woolhouse Lecture: David Baulcombe (The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich)
Small Silencing RNA: Single Strands in the Web of Life
David Baulcombe works on RNA-silencing systems that protect against viruses and mobile elements of DNA. His group have identified many components of the RNA silencing machinery and a key discovery was the short RNAs that are the specificity determinant. David Baulcombe's work in this area has emphasised the importance of plants as model systems for basic biology because his findings are relevant to RNA interference in animals. His recent interests have focussed on RNA silencing and its effects on growth, development and evolution in addition to its roles in defense and his title relating to the “dark matter of genetics” alludes to the finding that silencing RNAs can be considered analogous to the invisible mass in outer space: they are abundant, ubiquitous and influence the behaviour of the genetic universe. The recent work in David's group embraces a systems level analysis of RNA silencing and its influences direct or indirect on gene expression. Most of his work involves Arabidopsis but he has started to explore the role of RNA silencing in a crop plant (tomato) and in a unicellular alga (Chlamydomonas).
David's career started as an undergraduate in Harold Woolhouse's department at Leeds University and he is currently a senior research scientist in the Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich. In between time he did a PhD in Edinburgh, postdoc stints in Montreal and Athens, (Georgia) and he was a project leader at the privatised (sadly) and now defunct Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. He is an FRS and a foreign associate member of the US National Academy of Sciences. When not in the lab he enjoys sailing, hill walking and music.