Pioneer Member

Debby Delmer – I strongly believe Peter was one of the most underappreciated scientists in all of plant biology. His contributions to the field of plant cell wall chemistry and structure were ground-breaking. And, together with Alan Darvill, he founded and Co-Directed the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia, which is unmatched for its now broad excellence in technology development and research involving carbohydrate chemistry for both plants and animals. But especially under-appreciated were studies on cell wall-derived oligosaccharides in which Peter and his young students and post-docs discovered a whole new class of signaling molecules. In its day, this discovery was considered controversial. Today we now realize that the oligosaccharins derived from pectins are key signals that set off many different signaling cascades in response to both biotic and abiotic stresses. I suppose a lot of this under-appreciation comes from the fact that Peter, as a young scientist, could be a real pain as he bombarded you with his overwhelming enthusiasm—but if you could survive the onslaught (as I learned to do as one of his post-docs), you came to realize that he truly LOVED science and just couldn’t stop talking about new ideas and coming up with new theories. Some of them never panned out, but those that did changed the way we look at cell walls today.

Chris Somerville – I first met Peter in the late 1980s at a meeting on Fraser Island Australia. As I recall the meeting had been organized simply to expand personal connections between Australian and US scientists, so a wide range of topics were discussed. At that time, John Browse and I, and a talented group of students and postdocs, had been having success using mutants of Arabidopsis to dissect the pathways of lipid synthesis and function in Arabidopsis. So when Peter gave a memorable talk about the challenges of understanding the structure and function of cell walls, I was intrigued by the idea that Arabidopsis genetics could be useful in that field. Peter did not know much about molecular biology or genetics at that time, but he was very encouraging and collegial and patiently explained a lot of both theory and practice to me over a bottomless supply of beer. (The Aussies had neglected to bring drinking water to the “bushcamp” where the meeting was held, so I recall that we brushed our teeth in beer.) When I returned to Michigan, two newly arrived postdocs, Clint Chapple and Dieter Reiter, agreed to risk some of their time looking for cell wall mutants by gas chromatography of alditol acetates from a mutagenized population. The screen was quite successful and the cell wall became a major focus of my research program for many years.