Introducing Professor Lutz Nover, Plant Stress Section Editor

Dear Colleagues,

Most of this issue of Cell Stress & Chaperones is devoted to papers that mine the Arabidopsis genomic database for new members of stress response gene families (for a brief review, see Martienssen and McCombie 2001). The results are frequently compared with those in other organisms, for which entire genomic databases are available. This issue is thus an appropriate vehicle for introducing Professor Lutz Nover as founding editor of our new section, “Plant Stress.”

Since 1993, Lutz has been Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the Biocenter of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. He is presently Head of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology in the Botanical Institute at the Biocenter. He studied biology at Martin Luther University in Halle in the former East Germany. His PhD thesis was on alkaloid biosynthesis and its developmental control in Penicillium. Lutz began working on plant heat stress responses in 1978 while searching for inducible gene expression in tomato cell cultures. Working together, he and Klaus-Dieter Scharf observed that the induction of heat stress protein (Hsp) synthesis was connected with rapid dephosphorylation of ribosomal protein S6 (Scharf and Nover 1982). The pronounced molecular association of the prominent small Hsps in plants after heat stress led to the discovery of the heat stress granules. These are giant cytosolic multichaperone complexes that function as storage sites for housekeeping messenger ribonucleoproteins and heat stress transcription factor HsfA2 (Nover et al 1983, 1989; Scharf et al 1998; Kirschner et al 2000). During 1989 and 1990, the cloning and sequencing of the first plant heat stress transcription factors were accomplished, facilitated by a visit from K.-D. Scharf as a guest scientist in D. Baltimore's lab at the Whitehead Institute (Scharf et al 1990). Some plant Hsfs were found to be heat stress proteins in their own right. Tomato Hsfs were characterized in the following years with respect to their activator functions (Treuter et al 1993). Aromatic, hydrophobic, acidic amino acid motifs were defined as central elements of transcription-activating proteins in general (Döring et al 2000), and control of nuclear import and export of plant Hsfs was studied (Heerklotz et al 2001).

In addition to the publications on the original studies described above, Lutz found time to write the first and most comprehensive compilation and critical analysis of the cellular stress response literature (Nover 1991). In the same year, he edited a second monograph that brought together reviews of the effects of heat stress on development in a range of organisms (Hightower and Nover 1991). These monographs demonstrated his versatility and broad range of thinking, which are excellent attributes for an editor. Cell Stress & Chaperones is already the beneficiary of Professor Nover's considerable editorial skills, and the present issue, for which Nover and Jan Miernyk were monitoring editors, offers ample evidence of this (Nover and Miernyk 2001). I would also like to thank Jan for suggesting the theme of this issue.

To date, there have been only a few green papers in our journal. Professor Nover et al (1996) contributed a review on plant Hsfs. A second paper was contributed on chloroplast small Hsps (Härndahl et al 1999) and a third on a chloroplast transit peptide (Ivey and Bruce 2000). Thus, we have been open to publishing plant papers since the beginning of the journal, and we would like to encourage our colleagues in the plant stress response field to send their manuscripts to Cell Stress & Chaperones. We hope that the establishment of a dedicated section on plant stress, the appointment of a world renowned colleague in plant stress responses as section editor, and the publication of this issue on Arabidopsis will show our continuing commitment to intellectual cross-pollination in the stress response field.