Adrienne Clarke’s Impacts On Molecular Botany.
Adrienne Clarke’s Impacts on Molecular Botany.
Adrienne Clarke has contributed to the field of Botany with her work primarily in the molecular basis of self-incompatibility. She also has done significant research on a class of proteoglycans, the arabinogalactan-proteins. Along with that she has contributed work on proteinaze inhibitors and their use in control of insect development. She is a distinguished professor of botany at the University of Melbourne, and there continues her research on cell and developmental biology of arabinogalactan-proteins, along with being a major contributor to well-known scientific journals such as Nature, Science and Current Opinion in Plant Biology.
Her work with the molecular basis of self-incompatibility was built upon classical genetics and microscopy of the 1980s. With the given knowledge of self-incompatibility, the ability of many plants to recognize and reject their own pollen, which is a genetically controlled process and has been known since Darwin's observations two century old technique called gametophyte control was used for observation. Gametophyte control is a technique of molecular genetics in which gametes of the plants observed are controlled by cloning parts of the DNA for more controlled results in experimentation. In this research Clarke and her research team were the first to apply the techniques of “in situ” hybridization to localize expression of genes in plants to show the expression of the S-gene in the central transmitting tissue of the female pistil. In situ hybridization uses a labeled complementary DNA or RNA strand to localize a specific DNA or RNA sequence in a portion or section of tissue. They were also the first to clone a cDNA encoding the S-gene product from the female sexual tissues of Nicotiana alata, a member of the family Solanaceae and for a plant with gametophytically controlled self-incompatibility. These are tobacco plants that the sex tissues can be reproduced via...
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