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As a Harvard Medical School postdoc in the 1980s, Joanne Chory tried to grow plants in the dark. Since they can’t photosynthesize without light, the seedlings didn’t grow very well. Most didn’t form leaves, and they didn’t produce chlorophyll, making the sprouts white instead of green. Not all of Chory’s plants were duds, however. Some grew as if they were bathed in light. Because Chory was trying to understand how plants respond to light, these seedlings were exactly what she was looking for. And as it turned out, they would shape her career trajectory and revolutionize our understanding of plant biology.
Eager to understand how the plants grew despite living in darkness, Chory and her colleagues analyzed the expression of all the genes then known to be associated with light, and found that the genes were turned off in the dark, as they are in normal ...
