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Ralf Reski

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Ralf Reski
Prof. Ralf Reski
Born (1958-11-18) November 18, 1958 (age 65)
Gelsenkirchen, Germany

Ralf Reski (born 18 November 1958 in Gelsenkirchen) is a German Professor of Plant Biotechnology and former Dean of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg.[1] He is also affiliated to the French École supérieure de biotechnologie Strasbourg (ESBS)[2] and Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.[3]

Biography

Ralf Reski studied Biology, Chemistry and Pedagogy at the Universities of Giessen and Hamburg. He was awarded his doctorate in Genetics in 1990 by the University of Hamburg and received his habilitation in General Botany in 1994. From 1996 until 1999, he was a Heisenberg-Fellow of the German Research Foundation.[4]

He was appointed Distinguished Professor and entitled Ordinarius at the University of Freiburg in 1999, where he became Head of the newly established Department of Plant Biotechnology.[5] From 2001 until 2011, Reski was Director Plant Biotechnology at the Centre for Applied Biosciences (ZAB, University of Freiburg).[6] Also since 2010 he is elected senator and speaker in the academic senat of the university Freiburg.[7]

Reski is one of the founding Principal Investigators (PI) of the Centre for Biological Signalling Studies (bioss)[8] and of the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM).[9] Since 2011, he also is Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). SGBM, bioss and FRIAS are funded within the German Universities Excellence Initiative.[10] Furthermore, Reski is a founding PI of the Freiburg Initiative for Systems Biology (FRISYS)[11] funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Reski was one of the board members of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) from 2009 to 2012.[12] Since 2010, Reski is coordinator of QualFEEM, a TEMPUS-project for the improvement of Higher Education in the field of "environmental management and ecology" at the Russian Universities in Altai, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Tyumen. [13] In 2011 Reski was co-founder of the Trinational Institute for Plant Research (TIP).[14]

In 2011 Ralf Reski was elected as lifetime member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (German:Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften).[15]

In 2012 he organized a Plant Biology Congress [16] whicht attracted 1000 researchers from about 60 countries.

In 2013 Reski became Senior Fellow at the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS).[17]

Research

Moss bioreactor with Physcomitrella patens

Reski's main area of research with more than 180 scientific publications[18] comprises the genetics, proteomics, metabolism, and cell development of moss plants, using the technique of homologous recombination for creating knockout mosses by gene targeting in a reverse genetics approach.[19] Reski and his coworkers have identified hitherto unknown genes with biotechnological implication for agriculture and forestry.[20] The cultivation of moss cells and their utilization for Molecular Farming is another main focal point of his research.[21]

In 1998, Reski proposed the moss Physcomitrella patens as a model plant in biological research.[22] Since then, he has contributed significantly towards mosses becoming a model plant in biological research on a worldwide scale. In 2004, Reski and colleagues from the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan successfully proposed the genome of Physcomitrella patens for complete sequencing at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a facility of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).[23] The genome was released in December 2007,[24] with the bioinformatic work spearheaded by Reski´s group[25] and financed by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG). To date, the Freiburg Chair of Plant Biotechnology hosts an online database of Physcomitrella patens comprising the genomic sequence, annotated gene models and supplemental information.[26] Due to its scientific and economic importance, the genome of Physcomitrella patens has been chosen as a “flagship plant genome” by the DOE JGI in 2010.[27]

Also in 1998, Reski and coworkers generated a knockout moss by deleting an ftsZ gene and thus identified the first gene essential in the division of an organelle in any eukaryote.[28] Based on the results of further research on the ftsZ-gene family, Ralf Reski coined the term "plastoskeleton", analogous to the term "cytoskeleton", in 2000 and presented a new concept in cell biology of how chloroplasts, the green cell organelles of plants, change shape and divide.[29][30][31]

In 1999, the chemical company BASF invested more than 30 Mio. DM in a four-year cooperation project with Reski to identify new genes which may be able to make crop plants more resistant to drought, cold and attack by pests. Plants with improved nutritional value (vitamins or polyunsaturated fatty acids) have also been in the research focus of their collaboration.[32] In the same year, Reski invented the moss bioreactor[33] and founded “greenovation Biotech GmbH”,[34] a biotechnology company utilizing moss bioreactors for the production of pharmaceuticals.[35] In 2011, Reski and coworkers produced recombinant, biologically active human factor H in a moss bioreactor.[36]

In 2010, Reski established the International Moss Stock Center (IMSC), which stores and freely distributes moss strains, transgenics and ecotypes. The IMSC assigns accession numbers that can be used in scientific publications to facilitate identification and availability of the respective samples.[37]

Also in 2010, Reski and colleagues discovered a new mechanism of gene regulation; the epigenetic gene silencing by microRNAs.[38][39]

Reski is directly involved in Mossclone, a European project (7th Framework Programme, FP7) which started in 2012 and aims to develop an air quality monitoring tool by using devitalized moss clones.

Scientific board memberships

Editorial board memberships of scientific journals

  • 2002 – 2012 Plant Cell Reports[46][47]
  • 2004 – 2006 Plant Biology (Guest-Editor)
  • 2008 – 2013 Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology[48]
  • 2009 – 2012 Plant Cell Reports, Editor-in-Chief[49]
  • 2010 – 2012 Biology International[50]

References

  1. ^ CV Ralf Reski on University Homepage
  2. ^ Homepage of ESBS, German
  3. ^ Profile Ralf Reski on FRIAS homepage
  4. ^ Profile on researchgate.net
  5. ^ Article on Reski´s scientific career
  6. ^ Centre for Applied Biosciences, Plant Biotechnology
  7. ^ http://www.senat.uni-freiburg.de/
  8. ^ bioss homepage
  9. ^ Profile on SGBM homepage
  10. ^ Homepage University of Freiburg, Excellence Initiative
  11. ^ FRISYS homepage
  12. ^ Former board members of the IUBS
  13. ^ Environmental Management for Russia (Cordis wire)
  14. ^ Official TIP homepage
  15. ^ The members of the HAW since its foundation in the year 1909
  16. ^ http://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/lifenet/announcements-en/global-denken-lokal-handeln-plant-biology-congress-2012/view?set_language=en
  17. ^ http://www.usias.fr/en/ralf-reski/
  18. ^ ReskiLab publications
  19. ^ Reski, Ralf (1998). "Physcomitrella and Arabidopsis: The David and Goliath of reverse genetics". Trends in Plant Science. 3 (6): 209. doi:10.1016/S1360-1385(98)01257-6.
  20. ^ Reski, R.; Frank, W (2005). "Moss (Physcomitrella patens) functional genomics -- Gene discovery and tool development, with implications for crop plants and human health". Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics. 4 (1): 48–57. doi:10.1093/bfgp/4.1.48. PMID 15975264.
  21. ^ Decker, Eva L.; Reski, Ralf (2007). "Moss bioreactors producing improved biopharmaceuticals". Current Opinion in Biotechnology. 18 (5): 393–8. doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2007.07.012. PMID 17869503.
  22. ^ Reski, R. (1998). "Development, genetics and molecular biology of mosses" (PDF). Botanica Acta. 111: 1–15. doi:10.1111/j.1438-8677.1998.tb00670.x.
  23. ^ Doe Joint Genome Institute: Why sequence Physcomitrella patens?
  24. ^ Rensing, Stefan A.; Lang, Daniel; Zimmer, Andreas D.; Terry, Astrid; Salamov, Asaf; Shapiro, Harris; Nishiyama, Tomoaki; Perroud, Pierre-François; Lindquist, Erika A.; Kamisugi, Yasuko; Tanahashi, Takako; Sakakibara, Keiko; Fujita, Tomomichi; Oishi, Kazuko; Shin-i, Tadasu; Kuroki, Yoko; Toyoda, Atsushi; Suzuki, Yutaka; Hashimoto, Shin-ichi; Yamaguchi, Kazuo; Sugano, Sumio; Kohara, Yuji; Fujiyama, Asao; Anterola, Aldwin; Aoki, Setsuyuki; Ashton, Neil; Barbazuk, W. Brad; Barker, Elizabeth; Bennetzen, Jeffrey L.; Blankenship, Robert (2008). "The Physcomitrella Genome Reveals Evolutionary Insights into the Conquest of Land by Plants". Science. 319 (5859): 64–9. doi:10.1126/science.1150646. PMID 18079367.
  25. ^ Article on biotechnology information platform of German Federal Ministry of Education and Research: [1]
  26. ^ database cosmoss.org
  27. ^ Hudson Alpha Genome Sequencing Center on flagship plant genomes
  28. ^ Strepp, René; Scholz, Sirkka; Kruse, Sven; Speth, Volker; Reski, Ralf (1998). "Plant Nuclear Gene Knockout Reveals a Role in Plastid Division for the Homolog of the Bacterial Cell Division Protein FtsZ, an Ancestral Tubulin". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 95 (8): 4368–73. Bibcode:1998PNAS...95.4368S. doi:10.1073/pnas.95.8.4368. JSTOR 44902. PMC 22495. PMID 9539743.
  29. ^ Kiessling, J.; Kruse, S.; Rensing, S. A.; Harter, K.; Decker, E. L.; Reski, R. (2000). "Visualization of a Cytoskeleton-like Ftsz Network in Chloroplasts". The Journal of Cell Biology. 151 (4): 945–50. doi:10.1083/jcb.151.4.945. PMC 2169431. PMID 11076976.
  30. ^ McFadden, G. I. (2000). "Skeletons in the Closet: How Do Chloroplasts Stay in Shape?". The Journal of Cell Biology. 151 (4): F19–22. doi:10.1083/jcb.151.4.F19. PMC 2169437. PMID 11076959.
  31. ^ Reski, Ralf (2002). "Rings and networks: The amazing complexity of FtsZ in chloroplasts". Trends in Plant Science. 7 (3): 103–5. doi:10.1016/S1360-1385(02)02232-X. PMID 11906832.
  32. ^ Schiermeier, Quirin (1999). "German/Swedish venture creates plant biotechnology giant". Nature. 397 (6717): 283. Bibcode:1999Natur.397..283S. doi:10.1038/16754.
  33. ^ Patent “Production of proteinaceous substances”, on WIPO-database: [2]
  34. ^ Homepage greenovation Biotech GmbH, Profile of Ralf Reski
  35. ^ Decker, Eva L.; Reski, Ralf (2007). "Current achievements in the production of complex biopharmaceuticals with moss bioreactors". Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering. 31 (1): 3–9. doi:10.1007/s00449-007-0151-y. PMID 17701058.
  36. ^ Büttner-Mainik, Annette; Parsons, Juliana; Jérôme, Hanna; Hartmann, Andrea; Lamer, Stephanie; Schaaf, Andreas; Schlosser, Andreas; Zipfel, Peter F.; Reski, Ralf; Decker, Eva L. (2011). "Production of biologically active recombinant human factor H in Physcomitrella". Plant Biotechnology Journal. 9 (3): 373–83. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7652.2010.00552.x. PMID 20723134.
  37. ^ IMSC press release University of Freiburg
  38. ^ Khraiwesh, Basel; Arif, M. Asif; Seumel, Gotelinde I.; Ossowski, Stephan; Weigel, Detlef; Reski, Ralf; Frank, Wolfgang (2010). "Transcriptional Control of Gene Expression by MicroRNAs". Cell. 140 (1): 111–22. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2009.12.023. PMID 20085706.
  39. ^ Discovery: microRNAs can dirtectly turn off genes
  40. ^ http://www.bio-pro.de/magazin/index.html?lang=en&artikelid=/artikel/08000/index.html
  41. ^ Newspaper article on biosafety
  42. ^ Innovationsrat Baden-Württemberg
  43. ^ DNK-Presidency
  44. ^ VBIO Advisory board
  45. ^ IUBS board
  46. ^ http://www.springer.com/life+sci/cell+biology/journal/299?detailsPage=editorialBoard
  47. ^ http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/cell+biology/journal/299?detailsPage=press
  48. ^ Sciencemag
  49. ^ Editorial board Plant Cell Reports
  50. ^ Editorial board Biology International

News articles

See also

University of Freiburg Faculty of Biology

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