Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Anne Osbourn

2015; Wiley; Volume: 208; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/nph.13616

1469-8137

Anne Osbourn,

Plant Pathogens and Resistance

Linnea borealis – The Plant of Lapland Slender stem, split at the top, two white bell-shaped flowers, perfectly symmetrical, as if the plant had pressed herself. During my NESTA Fellowship I also founded the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Trust to support the development of a cross-disciplinary educational programme that I established as a side product of my sabbatical year (www.sawtrust.org). I then developed the SAW initiative further in my ‘spare time’, supported by a 5-year Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship. The SAW Trust celebrates its tenth birthday this year. Since it was founded thousands of children in the UK, the United States and China have taken part in SAW projects. It is very rewarding to be playing a role in inspiring young scientists from elementary school upwards. Anne Osbourn is a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre and Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy Alliance. She is also a Trustee of the New Phytologist Trust and an Editor of New Phytologist. Her research focuses on plant-derived natural products – function, synthesis, mechanisms of metabolic diversification and metabolic engineering. An important advance from the Osbourn laboratory has been the discovery that genes for specialized metabolic pathways are organized in ‘operon-like’ clusters in plant genomes, a finding that has opened up new opportunities for elucidation of new pathways and chemistries through genome mining. Anne has developed and coordinates the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) Initiative, a cross-curricular science education outreach programme (www.sawtrust.org). I am very curious about things. I like trying to make sense out of complexity. Also as my career has developed I have seen how technology development has made things possible. Some of these advances are incremental and somewhat predictable improvements; others are entirely new and unexpected disruptive technologies that enable quantum leaps forward. It is wonderful looking back to when I first started research and seeing just how far things have come. For those early career scientists in organizations that still have an old fashioned library with books in it, I recommend that you go there and spend a few hours looking at old literature from the decade of your choice. The 1980s are a good period to study because they were not that long ago in real terms; many of the people who are in senior posts now started their research careers then. When I was doing my botany degree at the University of Durham (1979–1982) a group had just transformed the nitrogen fixation genes from Rhizobium into Escherichia coli. Plant transformation using Agrobacterium tumefaciens was a new and exciting area. People were talking about engineering nitrogen fixation into crop plants (still very much a topic of interest). The first personal computer was invented in 1981 (although I did not have one for another 8 years or so), the compact disc player in 1982, and the Internet in 1983 (although the World Wide Web and the first webpage were not launched until the early 1990s). When I completed my PhD at the University of Birmingham in 1985 molecular biology was a big thing – the skill set to have. PCR was invented during my PhD (in 1984) and DNA profiling in 1985. During my first postdoctoral position at the John Innes Institute I learned how to do manual sequencing on GC-rich DNA of Xanthomas campestris, a bacterial pathogen of brassicas, read the DNA sequence off an autoradiograph film and wrote it down on graph paper. This was when sequencing one gene was a big deal. Reading the old literature makes you feel that anything is possible. My research programme now focuses on plant natural products – how they are made, what they do, and the mechanisms underpinning metabolic diversification. This really is trying to make sense out of complexity. But the recent and somewhat remarkable finding that the genes for a wide variety of different natural product biosynthetic pathways are organized in clusters in plant genomes is greatly accelerating pathway discovery; the number of sequenced plant genomes is growing rapidly and methods for genome mining have been developed; genes can now be commercially synthesized and assembled into expression constructs using rapid DNA assembly methods and so the slow and labour-intensive parts of cloning can be short-circuited; we have powerful heterologous expression platforms in place; and we have access to advanced metabolite analysis methods. These advances are enabling us to harness and engineer plant metabolic diversity using synthetic biology approaches. Some big challenges now are to understand the features of plant natural products that determine their bioactivities and to use this knowledge to make designer molecules for specific applications. There are always exciting new challenges. It never stops. As scientists we are limited only by our creativity. The excitement of science motivates me – of new discoveries and not knowing what each day is going to bring. However, to make sure that I stay on track and meet my objectives I keep lists. Lists are absolutely crucial to me. Having ideas is great, but we live in an ideas-rich society. Ideas are only worth something if they are implemented. It can be very difficult to prioritize, focus and deliver. I have a list of goals that I would like to achieve over a 6 month to 1 year period, generally to do with getting papers out and securing funding for areas of research. I also have a second tier of weekly and daily to-do lists that enable me to implement these plans and to get all my other managerial and administrative tasks completed. Planning and determination are critical for getting things done. The lists keep me going on the days where I might otherwise drift off and fritter away my very precious time. Having said that sometimes I wake up in the morning and decide to address something that is not on my lists but that I feel is suddenly a burning issue (e.g. to go and read up on an area that is niggling at me, or to set up a meeting with people to brainstorm something). Those unplanned forays can often prove to be very fruitful. People are obviously very important in science; that goes without saying. If you have the right people in your laboratory and provide them with a supportive environment then as a group leader you are well set up – but I feel that that is not enough. It is important to stretch people – to try to get them out of their comfort zones and encourage them to take on somewhat uncomfortable challenges. They will be amazed by what they can achieve and their confidence will grow and grow. I feel very proud of the many scientists who have worked with me and of what they have all gone on to do. My role models have been varied and have shifted throughout my career. My father, who died this year aged 93, taught me to always have a back-up plan and had many wise words on how to work with authority. I have learned a lot from his military experiences during the war (he was only 19 when he went, and was awarded a Military Cross for bravery). My mother brought myself and Jane up while working and running the household, without all the mod cons that modern households usually have now. That generation was tough. My mentors in my early scientific life were my PhD supervisor Chris Caten at the University of Birmingham and Mike Daniels, with whom I worked at the John Innes Institute and subsequently in the Sainsbury Laboratory. Otherwise elders with whom I have had many valuable conversations include David Hopwood, an Emeritus Professor at the John Innes Centre. It is noteworthy that none of the above are women, but I do not think that gender is the primary driver in finding a mentor and there are not many senior women out there in science. Professor Louise Swiniarksi, an internationally renowned educationalist at Salem State University in the United States and a long-term friend, has been an anchor throughout my adult life. I first met Louise when I was a child, when she used to organize US–UK student exchange visits with my father. Louise's experience of being a professional woman with children through the 1970s and onwards has meant that she has been able to teach me a lot about life in the big wide world. Many other people have helped me and I do not want this to read like a thank you speech at the Brit Awards. Other inspirational people that I must mention, however, are: Clive Scott (School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia) who mentored me during my NESTA fellowship – Clive and I continue to meet to discuss science, the arts and many other topics; Branco Weiss, founder of the Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship programme, who sadly died a few years ago and of whom I think often; and my husband Michael, who left school at 16, went into the heating and ventilating business and is not in the least bit interested in Impact Factors. I have many favourite papers. One of the ones that I particularly like is the elegant demonstration by Xu et al. (2012) of a role for root-derived diterpenes in allelopathy in rice. This to my knowledge is the first genetic evidence demonstrating a direct role for natural products in suppression of the growth of other plant species. I like the diversity of papers that are published in New Phytologist, from sterol biosynthesis in diatoms (Fabris et al., 2014) to root traits of plants that grow in the tundra (Iversen et al., 2015), and letters on engaging students with plant science (Levesley et al., 2014) and building the foundations for an open perspective on synthetic biology research and innovation (Rant & Tait, 2013).