Biography of Enrico Coen
نویسنده
چکیده
M ost snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus) live in scientific obscurity, taking a humble place in springtime gardens or bouquets. However, in the 1980s, molecular geneticist Enrico Coen helped to place these lowly plants in the spotlight. His work at the John Innes Center (JIC) in Norwich, U.K., used snapdragons as a model organism for studying plant development. Coen has identified and cloned several genes that affect f lower shape, size, and color (1). Using these snapdragon studies and parallel research on Arabidopsis, he and his colleagues developed a unified model to describe how genes interact to direct f lower formation (2–5). These contributions have earned him numerous awards and recognition, such as a 1998 election to the Royal Society in Britain and a 2001 election as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In Coen’s most recent work, he has strived to understand how patterns of gene activity lead to specific sizes and shapes of plant organs, a feat that combines experimental studies and computer modeling. In his Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, Coen and his colleagues describe a combination of factors integrated into a recently developed model to explain petal development (6). Similar models could eventually be applied to either plants or animals, aiding the search for key developmental genes.
منابع مشابه
An interview with Enrico Coen.
Enrico Coen CBE FRS is a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, who uses a variety of approaches to study patterning and morphogenesis in plants. We met with Enrico at the Spring Meeting of the British Society for Developmental Biology, where he was awarded the Waddington Medal, to ask him more about his career and his passion for art and book-writing.
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Rüdiger Simon received his Diplom in Biology, and later his PhD from the University of Cologne under the guidance of Peter Starlinger. He then performed post-doctoral work with Enrico Coen at the John Innes Centre in Norwich from 1991 to 1993, with Martin Ganal at the IPK in Gatersleben from 1993 to 1994, and with George Coupland at the John Innes Centre from 1994 to 1996. In 1996 he started an...
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