Dedication: George P. RédeiArabidopsisGeneticist and Polymath

Abstract

It was a sunny afternoon in early autumn of 1985. I was in the middle of processing my regular plasmid preps, when a distinguished gentleman accompanied by his wife entered our lab at the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne. He wore a moustache that accented his smile and had a neatly trimmed round beard, a splendid grey suit and an attractive necktie. He asked me in formal, polite English about the availability of my boss and friend, the late Professor Jeff Schell. Upon introducing himself, he probably noticed a familiar accent in my answer because he immediately turned the conversation to Hungarian, my mother tongue. Indeed, I was astonished. George Rédei, the legendary geneticist of Arabidopsis, stood in front of me saying that he would spend his sabbatical with us, fulfilling the invitation of Jeff Schell. As a young undergraduate, I saw him once at a congress in Szeged (Hungary), where in 1974 he disproved Ledoux's infamous DNA transformation studies, which caused much controversy in plant science during the early 1970s. Ledoux, a well-known researcher at that time, reported in Nature that he accomplished genetic complementation of Rédei's thiamine auxothrophic Arabidopsis mutants with transducing lambda phage DNAs carrying the thi locus of E. coli (Ledoux et al. 1974). Rédei et al. (1976) 1 Plant Breeding Reviews, Volume 26Edited by Jules Janick

Illumination of Arabidopsis roots induces immediate burst of ROS production

“…Nevertheless, the fact is that plant roots are extremely sensitive to light 1 and that this sensitivity is important for their optimal performance if grown outside in soil. 2 Ever since Arabidopsis has been brought to laboratories and showed that it can be grown in the transparent Petri dishes by George P. Rédei some 50 years ago, 3,4 Arabidopsis roots are routinely exposed to light during preparation for their analysis without comparing data obtained from the dark-grown controls. As a consequence, almost all studies published using Arabidopsis thaliana have used roots illuminated during seedling growth.…”

Reputation Management

“…It has a wide range of application areas such as services, film industry, consumer goods, measurability of the impact of online evaluations, monitoring of social media, monitoring of evaluation of products, services or brands, forecast of stock price development based on online evaluations, identification of cyberbullying, etc. Its priority tasks include identification of subjectivity, orientation, power and sentiment carrier, classification of emotions, detection of sarcasm, or various comparisons [57].…”

The development of Arabidopsis as a model plant

“…Interest in Arabidopsis research increased throughout the 1950s. One landmark event was the emigration in 1956 of George Rédei from Hungary to the United States (Koncz, 2006). From his laboratory at the University of Missouri, Rédei became the leading proponent of Arabidopsis research in the United States.…”

“…Arabidopsis also received negative publicity from a controversial set of experiments (Ledoux et al. , 1974) that claimed to demonstrate complementation of thiamine‐deficient mutants following treatment of seeds with DNA from Escherichia coli (Koncz, 2006). Interest in Arabidopsis research declined throughout this period, as reflected in decreased publication rates and fewer participants at the second international Arabidopsis conference in 1976 (Meyerowitz, 2001).…”

“…, 1998; Dean, 2001; Meyerowitz, 2001; Somerville and Koornneef, 2002; Pruitt et al. , 2003; van Lijsebettens and van Montagu, 2005; Koncz, 2006) or by interested observers (North, 1985; Patrusky, 1991; Moffat, 1992; Pennisi, 2000; Endersby, 2007; Leonelli, 2007). Readers are encouraged to consult Meyerowitz (2001) and Somerville and Koornneef (2002) for additional historical details.…”