IT is an extraordinary honor for us to introduce Professor Therese (Teri) Markow as the winner of the 2012 George W. Beadle Award. This award is given for outstanding contributions and service to our community—values truly personified by Teri. While we will try to describe Teri’s career and accomplishments below, her career is best summed up in her own words, “the flies often tell you what to do.”
Teri began her career studying anthropology at Arizona State University, receiving her B.S. degree in 1970. While anthropology may seem an unusual beginning for someone who would go on to become one of the foremost experts on the genetics and biology of Drosophila speciation, Teri says that what attracted her to anthropology was “the phenomenal variation observable in our own species. Beautiful people from Africa, from Siberia, amazing.”
But (and this is why teaching matters) Teri took a genetics course that persuaded her to stay on for a Ph.D.—in Genetics at Arizona State University. That opportunity and a common interest in horses led her to learn evolutionary biology from Theodosius Dobzhansky. As Teri tells it: “Theodosius Dobzhansky was a great horseman and wanted to ride whenever he visited Arizona. I owned a horse and thus was enlisted to take Dobzhansky riding every year. I was only 21 and initially terrified by this charge. But it turned out that he was great, [and] the rides exposed me to lengthy discussions of another species, D. pseudoobscura.”
Her later collaborations with Bill Heed at the University of Arizona broadened Teri’s interest in variation in the Drosophila species. The result is a scientist who has explored speciation at all possible levels from morphology to molecules—who has retained her roots in the evolution and ecology communities while establishing herself as a respected member of the fly genetics community. Her own research, on species of cactophilic Drosophila that live in the deserts of the southwestern United States and Mexico, has focused, and truly led the way, on elucidating the mechanisms of reproductive isolation in Drosophila. Studying those flies’ reproductive behaviors in the field and in the laboratory, Teri and her students and postdocs have identified pre- and post-mating isolation mechanisms between species. These polymorphisms include highly disparate feeding and breeding-site preferences, highly divergent mating behaviors, and differences in reproductive molecules. Their work has taken advantage of unique features of these desert Drosophila, including the availability of incipient species and of close sibling species that can interbreed in the laboratory. The focus of Teri’s laboratory on the ecology of these flies, in addition to the flies’ reproductive biology, has led the laboratory to make innovative findings in other areas as well, such as nutritional “nuptial gifts” from the male or genes involved in the utilization of different diets.
Teri’s path, with one foot in at least two very different scientific communities, has not always been easy. Each community questioned the valued of her work in the other discipline. To quote Teri, “a number of my colleagues came right out and said they didn’t think I was working on the really important biological problems and mechanisms and some even made fun of me for wasting time on species we knew so little about, and chasing them in places like Mexico. Honestly, there were times I felt like a complete outcast, but one has to do what one loves and follow one’s hunches. Sometimes one even gets lucky.” Our own experience is that scientists make their own luck. Teri has certainly made hers.
But this award is given for more than Teri’s own research effort: it is in recognition for Teri’s work for our community. Teri has served the scientific community in many capacities, including as editor of Evolution, director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Insect Science, as a National Science Foundation Program Director, and as a forceful advocate for gender equality, for providing higher education opportunities for students from less-privileged communities and for forging collaborations with students and faculty at Mexican universities. But the service that we wish to highlight is her leadership in making Drosophila species research available to the wider genetics community. Since the late 1990s Teri has maintained the Drosophila Species Stock Center, which has always been an important resource for evolutionary biologists, but is now an essential tool in our post-12-genomes world of Drosophila biology. The center carries 250 Drosophila species in a total of ∼1500 stocks, including strains of the same species from different places or carrying different markers (or even transgenes), and includes the reference strains whose genomes were sequenced. Maintaining some of these species can be challenging; they need coddling and special foods (e.g., the recipe for “Saguaro potato food” includes autoclaved cactus that is blended until creamy and then kneaded with finely ground potato buds). Teri not only provides the species and DNA and (through the Drosophila Species Stock Center’s website) all needed information for how to best maintain the flies, but also serves as the “first call” for information regarding the biology of those species, which she always generously shares.
Teri also played a vital role in getting those genomes sequenced! After the Drosophila melanogaster sequence was finished and that of Drosophila pseudoobscura was in the works, Teri hosted a group of Drosophila biologists at a meeting in Arizona to decide which other species might be best to sequence. The group considered issues that included how to get sufficient and useful phylogenetic coverage of the genus; finding species that were relatively straightforward to propagate and that had, or for which one could easily make, isogenic lines; and finding species with interesting or unusual ecological niches, reproductive behaviors, or other traits. That meeting resulted in a community white paper the active discussion and revision of which has led to final choices of the remaining 10 species. The last few years have more than proven the value of this effort, and the wisdom of the species choices.
But genome sequence alone lacks context without biology. Although some of the sequenced species have fascinating biology, the genetic basis of that biology can be investigated only if a cadre of scientists is well versed in this lore and in how to recognize and work with the species. To this end, in collaboration with Patrick O’Grady and others, Teri has hosted and taught the Annual Drosophila Species Workshop for 11 years. This course has kept alive volumes of information on the morphology, taxonomy, and cytogenetics of Drosophila that most surely would otherwise have been lost. Through it, a new generation has been trained in the intricacies and fascination of genus Drosophila, in how to identify and sort among the species of fly, and in the importance of each species to evolutionary and genetic biology. The workshop has been committed to text in the form of a truly important (and really useful) book entitled Drosophila: A Guide to Species Identification and Use, which Teri co-authored with Patrick O’Grady.
We began this article with a quote from Teri noting that the flies “often tell you what to do.” We could not agree more. But the second part of that bit of wisdom is that you have to ask the right questions in the right places; for Teri, those places range from laboratory benches in Arizona and California to the deserts of Mexico. And, most importantly, you have to actually listen to what the flies tell you—and make it possible for others to listen, too. Teri has done just that, and we are all the richer for it.