Detlef Weigel
Detlef Weigel ( * December 15, 1961 in Dannenberg ) is a German -American developmental biologist.
Life
Detlef Weigel grew up in Lüchow ( Wendland), studied from 1981 to 1985 biology and chemistry at the Universities of Bielefeld and Cologne. His thesis on the neurogenesis in Drosophila he made with José Campos - Ortega. Then he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where he pattern formation in the Drosophila embryo studied with Herbert Jaeckle. In his doctoral thesis, he described the first member of an important class of transcription factors, the forkhead proteins. His doctoral thesis submitted in 1988 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.
During his postdoctoral stay at Elliot M. Meyerowitz at Caltech in Pasadena, he turned to the plant molecular biology: he cloned and characterized the flower Identitätsgen LEAFY from Arabidopsis thaliana ( thale cress ). From 1993 to 2002 he was Assistant and Associate Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla. He took 2002 a reputation as a scientific member and director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where he founded the Department of Molecular Biology. He is also an honorary professor at the Salk Institute and the University of Tübingen.
Work
Weigel has studied the floral development and the control of beginning of flowering mainly in the 1990s. In both areas, the work of his laboratory have made a significant and often groundbreaking findings. He succeeded and his staff Ove Nilsson to transfer the LEAFY gene from Arabidopsis thaliana on aspens, whereby the period reduced to flowering of this tree for a few months. Furthermore discovered Weigel and his staff, the FT gene, whose product is an important part of the mobile Blühsignals; the journal Science this was one of the three major findings of 2005. developed novel from him genetic method led to the discovery of the first microRNA - mutant plants.
The study of factors that control the onset of flowering, awakened in Weigel interest in the evolution of adaptive features for which flowering is a prime example. Besides work on genetic variation in flowering time and other environment- dependent developmental processes also leads to the creation of new genomic resources, such as the first Haplotypkarte in a non-human organism, is of great importance. To this end, Weigel has called the 1001 Genomes Project for Arabidopsis thaliana to life. In addition, is examined as the newest issue of reproductive isolation, which Weigel has discovered that genetic barriers in plants are often associated with autoimmunity, in which in hybrid offspring gene products of the two parents an immune response in the absence of pathogens trigger, leading to hybrid necrosis dwarfism and a general restriction of reproductivity in these hybrids leads.