Professor Gerd Jürgens is a plant developmental biologist currently(as of end 2010) holding the posts of Director of the Cell Biology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and Head of the Center for Plant Molecular Biology(ZMBP) at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen. He has published extensively in leading journals, including eight papers in the journal Nature

Nature (journal)

Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

 as well as various articles in the journals Cell

Cell (journal)

Cell is a peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing research papers across a broad range of disciplines within the life sciences. Areas covered include molecular biology, cell biology, systems biology, stem cells, developmental biology, genetics and genomics, proteomics, cancer research,...

, Science

Science (journal)

Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

, Journal of Cell Biology

Journal of Cell Biology

The Journal of Cell Biology is an international, peer-reviewed journal owned by The Rockefeller University and published by The Rockefeller University Press.- History :...

 and The Plant Journal.

During his postdoctoral years in the 1980s he worked with Nobel prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 winners Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a German biologist who won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1991 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B...

 and Eric Wieschaus at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory is a molecular biology research institution supported by 20 European countries and Australia as associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and is an intergovernmental organisation funded by public research money from its member states...

 (EMBL) in Heidelberg on the topic of Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster is a species of Diptera, or the order of flies, in the family Drosophilidae. The species is known generally as the common fruit fly or vinegar fly. Starting from Charles W...

embryogenesis.
At the age of 37 he made the switch from animal to plant research and became one of the first researchers to work on what was later to become the model plant organism

Model organism

A model organism is a non-human species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the organism model will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. Model organisms are in vivo models and are widely used to...

: Arabidopsis thaliana

Arabidopsis thaliana

Arabidopsis thaliana is a small flowering plant native to Europe, Asia, and northwestern Africa. A spring annual with a relatively short life cycle, arabidopsis is popular as a model organism in plant biology and genetics...

.
He was responsible for pioneering research in the genetic dissection of plant embryogenesis

Plant embryogenesis

Plant embryogenesis is the process that produces a plant embryo from a fertilised ovule by asymmetric cell division and the differentiation of undifferentiated cells into tissues and organs. It occurs during seed development, when the single-celled zygote undergoes a programmed pattern of cell...

. Using the genetically-tractable plant Arabidopsis thaliana

Arabidopsis thaliana

Arabidopsis thaliana is a small flowering plant native to Europe, Asia, and northwestern Africa. A spring annual with a relatively short life cycle, arabidopsis is popular as a model organism in plant biology and genetics...

he conducted the first forward genetic

Forward genetics

Forward genetics is an approach that encompasses several means of identifying the gene or set of genes that are responsible for a particular phenotype within an organism. Initially, this entailed the generation of random mutations in an organism, often through radiation or insertional mutagenesis...

 screen (using mutagenesis with 0.3% ethyl methane sulfonate(EMS)) looking for embryonic defects.
His laboratory discovered and characterized the protein KNOLLE, which is required for cytokinesis

Cytokinesis

Cytokinesis is the process in which the cytoplasm of a single eukaryotic cell is divided to form two daughter cells. It usually initiates during the late stages of mitosis, and sometimes meiosis, splitting a binucleate cell in two, to ensure that chromosome number is maintained from one generation...

 and was the first protein known to exclusively target the cell plate

Cell plate

thumb|300px|Phragmoplast and cell plate formation in a plant cell during cytokinesis. Left side: Phragmoplast forms and cell plate starts to assemble in the center of the cell. Toawards the right: Phragmoplast enlarges in a donut-shape towards the outside of the cell, leaving behind mature cell...

 in plant cells.
Prof Gerd Jürgens also worked extensively on the ARF

ADP ribosylation factor

ADP Ribosylation Factors are members of the ARF family of GTP-binding proteins of the Ras superfamily. ARF family proteins are ubiquitous in eukaryotic cells, and six highly conserved members of the family have been identified in mammalian cells. Although ARFs are soluble, they generally...

-GEF

Guanine nucleotide exchange factor

Guanine nucleotide exchange factors activate monomeric GTPases by stimulating the release of guanosine diphosphate to allow binding of guanosine triphosphate . A variety of unrelated structural domains have been shown to exhibit guanine nucleotide exchange activity...

 GNOM. Both knolle and gnom were first discovered in his embryonic mutant screens

Genetic screen

A genetic screen is a procedure or test to identify and select individuals who possess a phenotype of interest. A genetic screen for new genes is often referred to as forward genetics as opposed to reverse genetics, the term for identifying mutant alleles in genes that are already known...

.

Prizes and Awards

Prof Gerd Jürgens won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is a research prize awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft every year since 1985 to scientists working in Germany. This highest German research prize consists of a research grant of 2.5 million euro, to be used within seven years...

(the highest research prize in Germany) in 1995.

External links

Website of the Zentrum für Molekularbiologie der Pflanzen (Center for Plant Molecular Biology) where Prof Gerd Jürgens works

• http://www.zmbp.uni-tuebingen.de/

Website of the Gerd Jürgens laboratory including research interests and publications

• http://www.zmbp.uni-tuebingen.de/developmental-genetics/juergens.html