Neu gewählte Mitglieder 2009 (pdf) - Leopoldina

Prof. Ph.D.
George Michael Coupland
*20 th December 1959 Dumfries (UK)
Section: Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Matricula Number: 7259
Date of Election: 29 th April 2009
George Coupland is currently a Director of the Max
Planck Institute (MPI) for Plant Breeding Research in
Cologne. He leads the department of Plant Developmental
Biology. He received an Honours degree in Microbiology from the University
of Glasgow (UK) in 1981. His doctoral work was in the Department of Molecular
Biology, University of Edinburgh (UK), where he studied the mechanisms of
conjugation in bacteria. In 1985, he received a Royal Society Fellowship and an
EMBO Fellowship to carry out post-doctoral research at the University of Cologne
in the department of Peter Starlinger. There he developed methods to analyze the
function of maize transposable elements in transgenic tobacco plants. In 1989, he
returned to the UK and began his own group at the newly formed John Innes Centre
in Norwich (UK).
Between 1989 and 2001, the Coupland lab developed Arabidopsis as a model
system to study the seasonal control of flowering by environmental cues. The group
was among the first to isolate genes that regulate flowering time and those required
for plant circadian clock function. This led to an influential model of how plants
detect seasonal changes in day length. He was appointed a Director at the MPI for
Plant Breeding Research in 2001. There his group has demonstrated the multiple
regulatory layers of transcriptional and post-translational regulation that contribute
to day length measurement. They have also studied the function of flowering
pathway components in different organs of the plant, leading to the identification
of a systemic signal transmitted from the leaves to the apex where it induces flower
development. Recently they have studied how these pathways evolve to confer differences
in flowering behaviour between annual and perennial species.
Publications (Selection):
– Corbesier, L., Vincent, C., Jang, S., Fornara, F., Fan, Q., Searle, I., Giakountis, A., Farrona,
S., Gissot, L., Turnbull, C., and Coupland, G.: FT protein movement contributes to long-distance
signalling in floral induction of Arabidopsis. Science 316, 1030 –1033 (2007)
– Fornara, F., Panigrahi, K. C. S., Gissot, L., Sauerbrunn, N., Rühl, M., Jarillo, J., and Coupland,
G.: Arabidopsis DOF transcription factors act redundantly to reduce CONSTANS expression
and are essential for a photoperiodic flowering response. Developmental Cell 17, 75 – 86 (2009)
– Wang, R., Farrona, S., Vincent, C., Joecker, A., Schoof, H., Turck, F., Alonso-Blanco, C.,
Coupland, G., and Albani, M.: PEP1 regulates perennial flowering in Arabis alpina. Nature 459,
423 – 427 (2009)
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