IS-MPMI President Sheng Yang He and IS-MPMI member Jonathan Jones have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
He, a distinguished professor at Michigan State University (MSU), was elected as a member of NAS for his research focusing on the infectious disease susceptibility in plants, and Jones, a group leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL), was elected as a foreign associate of NAS for his outstanding career researching plant-pathogen interactions.
Joining the 2,250 active members and 452 foreign associates of the NAS, He and Jones spoke glowingly of their appointments and of the molecular plant-microbe interactions (MPMI) field in a recent e-mail exchange with IS-MPMI staff.
Staff: What does being elected to the NAS membership mean to you?
He: I am very honored and happy that my research on the molecular basis of disease susceptibility/bacterial pathogenesis in plants was recognized by the NAS this year. I am indebted to my lab members and collaborators—some of whom are well-known IS-MPMI members—for a scientific journey that coincided with a paradigm-shifting period of molecular plant-microbe interactions research. This is a tremendous honor that I could not have possibly imagined when I was growing up in a small village in China. Elected in the same year as Professor Jonathan Jones, a pioneer in the field, makes this recognition extra special. Indeed, there are so many colleagues in our community who deserve this recognition. I can only hope that some of them will receive it soon.
Jones: Personally, I’m totally thrilled and honored by this recognition by the NAS of my lab’s work. My cheek muscles are still a little tired from all that smiling! It’s an accolade for all the wonderful accomplishments of the many outstanding post-docs and students whom I’ve been privileged to host in my lab. And it’s a tribute to the generous and sustained support to TSL from David Sainsbury’s Gatsby Foundation, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Staff: What has motivated you to study molecular plant-microbe interactions?
He: Growing up in a small village in China, I witnessed the daily impact of crop diseases and insect pests on farmers’ lives. But I was not specifically interested in molecular plant-microbe interactions research until my graduate school years. I was one of the Chinese students who were fortunate enough to be able to come to the United States and pursue a Ph.D. degree in plant science. Alan Collmer’s lectures on the cloning of avr, hrp, and pectic enzyme genes in the late 1980s fascinated me tremendously. The Arabidopsis-Pseudomonas syringae pathosystem—established by the laboratories of Brian Staskawicz, Fred Ausubel, and Jeff Dangl—provided a golden opportunity for our research on dissecting the molecular basis of disease susceptibility in plants. Since then, there has been no turning back.
Jones: This field has everything. My training was in plant biology and genetics, and each plant-microbe interaction provides new examples of coevolution. I got into the field as a post-doc with Fred Ausubel in 1981–1982, and went to the first IS-MPMI meeting in Bielefeld in 1982. At that meeting I realized I had found my community. There was so much to learn. I had to learn about bacterial, fungal, and oomycete mechanisms and diversity. I had to learn to think about the MPMI problem at a range of levels—including the diversifying and frequency-dependent selection that drives genetic diversity in host and pathogen populations, the repertoires of resistance genes and recognized effector genes on which selection operates, and the molecular mechanisms that underpin recognition or its evasion. There are so many important diseases that constrain crop yields, each of which provide a great opportunity for new insights into biology.
Staff: What do you see for the future of the MPMI field?
He: Looking forward, I hope that some of the fascinating basic knowledge generated by the IS-MPMI community will be translated to effective methods to solving one of the biggest challenges in agriculture: biotic stresses. I am very jealous of the junior members of our society; the students, post-docs, and faculty just starting their careers. I wish that I were 20 years younger and could start all over again. I would choose to study an interesting question that is not a hot topic, but could potentially become one, with proper use of emerging techniques/model systems.
Jones: As new tools and insights emerge, it is becoming more realistic to aim to design, or to evolve in the lab, resistance genes with defined recognition specificities. I love working in that sweet spot where the topic is really interesting, and the outcome of your experiments might be really useful. MPMI is wonderful.