Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) is regarded as the father of genetics owing to his meticulous research on the common garden pea (Pisum sativum) that allowed him to deduce fundamental laws of inheritance. His insights were developed long before we understood the structure of DNA and the genes that constitute Mendel’s inheritance “factors.” This year, scientific journals, societies, and research institutes around the world are celebrating with special issues, conferences, seminars, fetes, and other events to mark the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Mendel’s birth. Many interesting events are planned in Brno, Czech Republic (the site of St Thomas’s Abbey, where Mendel conducted his work), including an eagerly anticipated international genetics conference (https://mendel.brno.cz/). The Gregor Mendel Institute of Plant Molecular Biology in Vienna, Austria, is paying tribute in innovative fashion (https://gregormendel200.org/), including documenting the arrival of a 7-m-tall pea seed at a Symposium honoring Mendel at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna. We chose to celebrate Mendel’s birthday and his achievements along with recent advances in plant genetics by inviting several leading plant geneticists to review their areas of expertise for this special issue.
Ortrun Mittelsten Scheid (Mittelsten Scheid, 2022) offers a perspective on Mendel’s work that emphasizes Mendel’s extensive preparation and thoughtful experimental design, completed prior to conducting his famous crossing experiments. This surely translates into excellent advice for students and research scholars of all ages and disciplines! Frédéric Berger (Berger 2022) follows with a stimulating exercise in imagining which field of research Mendel might choose in the 21st century. In so doing, Berger neatly links Mendel’s 19th-century masterpiece to contemporary plant molecular biology and provides a perspective balancing Mendel’s neglected and misunderstood later work on Hieracium with his well-known Pisum experiments. Rounding out this set of perspective articles, James Birchler and Hua Yang (Birchler and Yang, 2022) discuss the multiple fates of gene duplications: deletion, hypofunctionalization, subfunctionalization, neofunctionalization, dosage balance constraints, and neutral variation.
The three perspectives are followed by six in-depth review articles. Martin Lysak (Lysak, 2022) gives us a fascinating treatise on end-to-end and nested chromosomal fusions, discussing how these processes likely played a key role in the evolution of eukaryotic genomes. He pays tribute to the work of Barbara McClintock and Cyril Darlington in this area, in addition to Mendel, whose ideas strongly influenced their own seminal work. Eugene Shakirov, Julian Chen, and Dorothy Shippen (Shakirov et al., 2022) review recent advances in plant telomere biology, discussing how “lessons learned from plants continue to push the boundaries of science, revealing detailed molecular mechanisms in telomere biology with broad implications for human health, aging biology, and stress response.” Annis Richardson and Sarah Hake (Richardson and Hake 2022) review classic morphological mutants of maize, their importance in the history of genetics, and their key role in our fundamental understanding of plant development. Richardson and Hake point out that Mendel himself arguably was the first maize geneticist, as he conducted experiments with maize to test the laws of inheritance deduced from his work with garden peas (reviewed by Rhoades, 1984). Elizabeth (Toby) Kellogg (Kellogg, 2022) provides us with a wonderful synthesis of information concerning the genetic control of inflorescence architecture in the grasses, summarizing what is known about gene regulation and presenting intriguing hypotheses about the control of meristem identity. Hokuto Nakayama, Aaron Leichty, and Neelima Sinha (Nakayama et al., 2022) review our knowledge of leaf developmental genetics and the diversification of leaf forms, emphasizing natural variation and conserved gene regulatory networks. Finally, Avraham Levy and Moshe Feldman (Levy and Feldman, 2022) provide a thorough review of the complex evolution and origin of bread wheat. They cogently argue that an understanding of its origin and evolutionary trajectories will aid the “use and conservation of the vast gene pool of wheat biodiversity on which our food security depends.”
We do not know what Gregor Mendel would choose as a field of study in the 21st century; we only know that his painstaking analyses of seven carefully selected traits (see Figure) assessed in approximately 28,000 pea plants over the course of a decade (Mendel, 1866) allowed him to discover fundamental laws of inheritance taught to all students of genetics to this day. We celebrate Mendel’s 200th birthday with thanks to all of the authors of this focus issue for their work in creating this excellent set of review articles in plant genetics, and to the anonymous reviewers who helped to improve them. We trust readers will find these articles as enlightening and entertaining as we did! We expect to publish several additional reviews in areas of plant genetics within the next 12 months, and these will later be added to a focus collection on plant genetics accessed via the collections page at https://academic.oup.com/plcell/pages/collections.
Figure.
Pea traits studied by Mendel. Image credit: Cornell, B. 2016. Mendel’s Laws. Available at: http://ib.bioninja.com.au (accessed April 14, 2022).
Contributor Information
Nancy A Eckardt, Senior Features Editor, The Plant Cell, American Society of Plant Biologists, USA.
James A Birchler, Senior Editor, The Plant Cell, American Society of Plant Biologists, USA; Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA.
Blake C Meyers, Editor-in-Chief, The Plant Cell, American Society of Plant Biologists, USA; Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St Louis, Missouri 63132, USA; Division of Plant Science and Technology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA.
References
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