The Role of the Arabidopsis Morning Loop Components CCA1, LHY, PRR7, and PRR9 in Temperature Compensation

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Patrice Salom�

Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, T�bingen, Germany.

Education: PhD: Biology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Non-scientific Interests: running, swimming, biking, reading, Egypt, any kind of dessert (hence the first three interests).

While an undergraduate in France, I wrote up a bibliography report on GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein), and to be thorough I decided to check out other reporter genes and compare them to GFP. This brought me to read the seminal 1995 Science article from Steve Kay about the isolation of circadian mutants in Arabidopsis. I just couldn�t wrap my head around the concept of a mechanism that could keep a 24-h period all by itself, and thus started my fascination with the circadian clock. I initially looked at temperature compensation in the prr7,9 double mutant to make sure that the mutant did NOT have any defects in this aspect of circadian biology, but luckily was proven wrong rather quickly.