Profile of Joseph R. Ecker
- Bijal P. Trivedi, Freelance Science Writer
In a Greek translation of the Old Testament, a prophet named Amos said, “I was a herdsman and a piercer of figs,” a reference to the ancient practice of slashing a fig to hasten ripening. The cut fig rots, but as it does it emits a gas that ripens other unmarred fruit. “Amos was out in the field inducing an ethylene response,” speculates Joseph R. Ecker, a professor at the Plant Biology Laboratory at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, who has pioneered the understanding of ethylene's role in fruit ripening, pathogen defense, and germination in plants. “So that's the first commercial application you can find of ethylene technology,” Ecker says.
Ecker, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and a member of the PNAS Editorial Board, has spent much of the last 25 years dissecting the genetics and identifying key signaling components of the ethylene pathway in plants. He was an early advocate of and participant in sequencing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, which gained a foothold as the plant world's model organism only in the late 1980s. He has also developed many genomic tools and resources for Arabidopsis researchers, such as chips to identify all the transcripts in the genome and a collection of Arabidopsis plants carrying mutations for almost every gene, which have revolutionized plant biology. In his Inaugural Article in a recent issue of PNAS (1), Ecker and his colleagues describe the role of a member of the ethylene pathway.
Joseph R. Ecker
Attic to Laboratory
Ecker's interest in all things science was nurtured by a series of influential coincidences. The first was the fact that his birthplace in Mount Carmel, PA, was in the middle of coal mining country. The region was punctuated with massive boulders that Ecker would explore and chip at with …
