Detlef Weigel | |
|---|---|
 Weigel in 2016 | |
| Born | (1961-12-15)December 15, 1961 (age 63) Dannenberg (Elbe), Germany |
| Nationality | German and US (naturalized) |
| Alma mater | Bielefeld University,University of Cologne |
| Awards | McClintock Prize (2019) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2007) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biology |
| Institutions | Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology University of Tübingen Salk Institute |
| Doctoral advisor | Herbert Jäckle [de] |
| Website | weigelworld |
Detlef Weigel (born 1961 inLower Saxony,Germany) is a German American[1] scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology.
Weigel was an undergraduate inbiology andchemistry at the universities ofBielefeld andCologne. In 1986, he graduated with aDiploma inbiology for this thesis onDrosophilaneurogenesis with the late José Campos-Ortega. In 1988, he moved to theMax Planck Institute for Developmental Biology inTübingen. During his PhD work withHerbert Jäckle [de],[2] he discovered the founding member of an important class of transcription factors, theForkhead/FOX proteins.[3][4] In 1988, he graduated with a PhD (summa cum laude) from theUniversity of Tübingen.
Weigel began to work withplants during hispostdoctoral research withElliot M. Meyerowitz atCaltech, where hecloned the floral regulatorLEAFY fromArabidopsis thaliana.[5] From 1993 to 2002, he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at theSalk Institute for Biological Studies inLa Jolla. In 2002, he accepted an appointment as Scientific Member and Director at theMax Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where he founded the Department forMolecular Biology. He is also anadjunct professor at theSalk Institute and theUniversity of Tübingen. In 2012, Weigel co-founded the plantbioinformatics startup companyComputomics in Tübingen.He is Co-Editor-in-Chief ofeLife.[6]
During the 1990s, Weigel mostly studied the development of individual flowers and how the onset of flowering is regulated. His group made important discoveries in both areas. Together with Ove Nilsson, he demonstrated that transfer of theLEAFY gene fromArabidopsis thaliana toaspen trees was sufficient to reduce the time to flowering from years to months.[7] Weigel and his team isolated theFT gene,[8] which was later found to be an important component of the mobile signal inducing flowering.[9] New genetic tools developed by his group led to the discovery of the firstmicroRNA mutant in plants.[10]
Through his study of factors that control the onset of flowering, a quintessential adaptive trait, Weigel became interested in more general questions ofevolution. Apart from work on genetic variation in environment-dependent developmental processes, his group is known for the generation of extensive genomic resources, such as the firsthaplotype map for a non-mammalian species.[11][12] To further exploit and advance the understanding of genetic variation, Weigel and colleagues initiated the1001 Genomes project forArabidopsis thaliana. Related to this is a new area of interest, in genetic barriers. In collaboration withJeffery Dangl, his group discovered that such barriers in plants are often associated withautoimmunity. They could show that in certainhybrid offspring, specific gene products contributed by one of the parents may be inappropriately recognized as foreign and pathogenic, and thus trigger pervasive cell death throughout the plant.[13] Most of the causal genes encode components of the immune system, indicating that there are constraints on the assembly of an optimal immune system.[14] Several cases have been examined in detail and shown to be due to direct protein-protein interactions.[15][16]
