Environmental Microbiology

BIOGRAPHY

ACADEMIC POSITION:
Professor of Microbiology, University of Washington, Seattle

EDUCATION:
Dr Nester was educated at Cornell and Western Reserve University, and did postgraduate work at Stanford.

MEMBERSHIPS AND AWARDS:
He served as a specialist for the Chinese University Development Project at Nankai University, Tianjin, PRC, and as an invited scholar for the US-China Visiting Scholar Exchange Program of the National Academy of Sciences. He held a Burroughs Wellcome Visiting Professorship in Microbiology. He has received a number of awards for his research including the inaugural Australia Prize (1990) and the Cetus Award in Biotechnology (1991). In 1994 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the editorial board of CRC Critical Reviews in Plant Science and Molecular-Plant Microbe Interactions. He is currently Chair of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the National Academy of India.

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Research in Dr Nester’s laboratory is concerned with a molecular analysis of plant-bacterial interaction, using the crown gall-plant tumor system as a model. The soil microorganism, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, transfers a small piece (T-DNA) of a tumor-inducing (Ti) plasmid into plant cells, where it becomes integrated into the plant chromosome and confers new properties on the tissue. Agrobacterium is currently being used worldwide to genetically engineer plants.

Dr Nester’s laboratory is attempting to understand the mechanisms by which Agrobacterium interacts with plant cells at various levels. Studies in his laboratory have shown that one of the first stages in the bacterial-plant interaction involves the activation of bacterial genes by signals from the wounded plant. These genes, the vir genes, are essential for the processing and transfer of the T-DNA into plant cells. A major focus is to elucidate how Agrobacterium recognizes and processes these plant signals to activate the vir genes. Other studies involve a genetic-biochemical analysis of the vir genes to determine their function in the transfer of T-DNA into plant cells.