Profile of jeffery L. Dangl.

I f you make the mistake, as some do, of calling Jeff Dangl a botanist, his embarrassment is palpable. Trained as a mouse immunologist, he admits to a “certain lack” of botanical knowledge. The John N. Couch distinguished professor of biology and adjunct professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will, however, give you an earful about the lack of respect, and with it, funding, historically given to the plant sciences compared with his former field of immunology. He studies Arabidopsis thaliana, a fastgrowing, weedy plant known as thale cress, which has become the Drosophila of plant-based molecular biology. Long before it became the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced, Dangl was among a handful of researchers who pioneered its use as a model system for studying plant disease resistance, not solely as botanists but using all of the powerful tools of molecular biology, genetics, and plant pathology combined. He was at the cutting edge of what he calls a mini-revolution that not only showed that plants have an immune system, but that, at the genetic and molecular levels, the system shares basic organizational traits with mammals. For his work in deciphering how plants interact, at the molecular level, with pathogens to fight off disease, Dangl was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. In his Inaugural Article (1), Dangl, his graduate/postdoctoral student David Hubert, and colleagues build on that work using genetics techniques to show how three chaperone molecules interact to control the levels of nucleotidebinding domain and leucine-rich repeat (NB-LRR) proteins—critical intracellular receptors for proper immune function in plants.