ELLIOT MEYEROWITZ
George W. Beadle Professor of Biology
California Institute of Technology
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute © ROB GREER PHOTOGRAPHYIn 1980, Elliot Meyerowitz was a newly minted assistant professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) studying Drosophila melanogaster development. He was asked to teach a graduate genetics seminar, and after leading the session on plant development and discussing the subject with his then graduate student Robert Pruitt, he decided, with Pruitt, to dabble in plant genetics using Arabidopsis thaliana. Meyerowitz had become interested in plant genetics in graduate school and thought that there were opportunities to apply molecular cloning—a new technique that he had learned as a postdoc at Stanford University—to plants.
“The literature indicated that the Arabidopsis genome was relatively small, which at the time, was a prerequisite for molecular cloning. And the attempts to do mutagenesis in plants showed that chemical mutagenesis appeared very effective and that the genes segregated in a Mendelian fashion, which is not true in many plants because of polyploidy,” Meyerowitz says. “Arabidopsis self-fertilizes, so you can get homozygous mutants quickly and have more than 10,000 seeds from these small plants. You could grow a million plants in a boiler room instead of needing 50 acres to grow corn!”
“I think if animal developmental biologists were more open-minded about plant research, biology overall would benefit.”
Supplied with Arabidopsis seeds by Pruitt’s uncle, a plant breeder at Washington State University, the Meyerowitz ...
