Learning from experience: Professors Gareth Jenkins and John Christie

Issued: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:37:00 BST

Ultraviolet-B light is potentially damaging to all living organisms – it causes sunburn, skin ageing, cataracts and some forms of cancer in humans. Yet plants remain unharmed by their constant exposure to UV-B, using the light instead as a regulatory signal to aid survival. Exploring the biology behind this, Professors Gareth Jenkins and John Christie published a joint paper on UV-B photoreceptors in Science in April 2012.

Professor Jenkins is an expert in plant cell and molecular biology. ‘The aim of the research is to understand how environmental stimuli, in particular light, regulate plant gene expression and development,’ he explains. ‘Our focus is the structure of the UV-B photoreceptor, a doughnut-shaped protein called UVR8. It’s the UVR8 protein that senses UV-B and initiates various processes in the plant that help to protect against UV-B as well as promote various other regulatory responses.’

Professor Christie is an expert in photobiology. ‘My focus is in understanding how the UV-B photoreceptors work at a molecular level: how it is that a photochemical reaction is converted into a biochemical reaction,’ he says. ‘If we can understand how these “molecular light switches” work, we can apply that knowledge to make molecular tools.’

For both academics, work is fundamentally driven by scientific curiosity, but the team is well aware of the potential applications of the UVR8 research. ‘One of the changes that UV-B initiates in the plant is the accumulation of secondary products like flavonoids,’ says Professor Jenkins. ‘These are important to the human diet and they also influence various other properties of the plant nutritionally. In addition, secondary metabolite changes in the plant impact on its palatability to insects. One of our projects looked at how we can use this knowledge to produce crops that are insecttolerant.’

In his time at Glasgow, Professor Jenkins has supervised more than 20 PhD students. Two are now professors themselves; several more are lecturers, while others work in industry. He rates Glasgow highly in terms of the quality of intellectual training, research and opportunities. So too does Professor Christie, who has five years’ experience of working at Stanford University and a further two years’ experience at the Scripps Research Institute, California.

‘A good thing to remember about doing your PhD in the UK is that you tend to get it finished within three to four years,’ says Professor Christie. ‘In the US, it takes at least five years, the same for some places in Europe because of the strong emphasis there on publishing. One of my former students has just got a lectureship back here and he isn’t even 30 yet.’