MARTIN YANOFSKY

Explore & Discover with Martin Yanofsky:
Extracting DNA

In His Words

As a young child, I remember being fascinated by creatures that lived in the sea. I still have fond memories of being glued to the TV watching the incredible underwater explorations of Jacques Cousteau. These underwater mysteries sparked a deep curiosity in me and made me dream of some day becoming an oceanographer. It was this fantasy that led me to pursue my college degree at the University of California, San Diego, where the world famous Scripps Institution of Oceanography is located. Although I never fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming an oceanographer (or my other childhood dream of being a major league baseball player), I did have many valuable opportunities to explore cutting-edge research while I was an undergraduate student. It was these hands-on research experiences that ignited a spark inside me and allowed me to focus my career goals on some day having my own laboratory to explore the mysteries of science. These early experiences and the fact that my laboratory is located on the same campus at which I started my college career are constant reminders of how important an early, positive exposure to science can be in encouraging someone to become a scientist.

As an undergraduate, I worked for several years in a laboratory studying the symbiotic interactions between a soil bacterium called Rhizobium with plants. It was these studies that led me to pursue my graduate research on a bacterium called Agrobacterium that causes tumors in plants. Although I was not formally trained as a plant biologist, it was these studies of plant-microbe interactions that led me to pursue my postdoctoral work in plant development, an area of study that I still work on today. I still find it remarkable to think that, only a decade or so ago, none of the genes controlling plant development had been identified. Here we are, only a short time later, and I think it's fair to say that nearly all of the major regulators of plant development have been characterized. That doesn't mean that we have it all figured out, it just means that we have most of the pieces of the puzzle. It's clear that the next five to ten years will yield remarkable insights into plant growth and development and that many of these insights will have important applications.

Contact Martin Yanofsky at marty@ucsd.edu