Biography of Enrico Coen
- Christen Brownlee, Science Writer
Most snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus) live in scientific obscurity, taking a humble place in springtime gardens or bouquets. However, in the 1980s, molecular geneticist Enrico Coen helped to place these lowly plants in the spotlight. His work at the John Innes Center (JIC) in Norwich, U.K., used snapdragons as a model organism for studying plant development. Coen has identified and cloned several genes that affect flower shape, size, and color (1). Using these snapdragon studies and parallel research on Arabidopsis, he and his colleagues developed a unified model to describe how genes interact to direct flower formation (2–5). These contributions have earned him numerous awards and recognition, such as a 1998 election to the Royal Society in Britain and a 2001 election as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.
Enrico Coen (left) and his collaborator, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, seated on a glacier in Calgary, Canada.
In Coen's most recent work, he has strived to understand how patterns of gene activity lead to specific sizes and shapes of plant organs, a feat that combines experimental studies and computer modeling. In his Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, Coen and his colleagues describe a combination of factors integrated into a recently developed model to explain petal development (6). Similar models could eventually be applied to either plants or animals, aiding the search for key developmental genes.
A Blossoming Career
Coen grew up surrounded by science: his father was a physicist and his mother was a chemist. Drawn to his family's career path, Coen decided to take a somewhat different route by eschewing the physical sciences in favor of the life sciences. He cultivated an interest in biology, stimulated at age 15 by a biochemistry book titled The Chemistry of Life (7). “[Reading the book] was a real eye opener. …
