Mari Rédei Tenkhoff
George Rédei Seed Stock Award
“The recognition for him wasn’t that important. It was the ability to keep working and doing what he wanted to do.”
“George was 20 to 30 years ahead of his time. He knew the power of Arabidopsis, but no one else knew what it could do.”
The North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC) and the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) established the George Rédei Seed Stock Award in 2023 to recognize the Arabidopsis scientist that has donated the most seed stocks to ABRC the previous year. The Award is named after Dr. George Rédei, a founder of Arabidopsis as the reference flowering plant. Dr. Rédei was born in 1921 in Vienna and grew up in Hungary. His father was an agronomist, which likely spurred his early interest in plants. While in college, during World War II, he was deported to a forced labor camp where he worked in a coal power plant for two years before narrowly escaping the Nazi retreat to Germany. He lost his parents to the war, and his brother who died in a Soviet prisoner camp. In 1956, during the Soviet response to the thwarted Hungarian Revolution, he and his wife, Magdolna, fled Hungary as refugees and arrived in Missouri, Columbia, USA. He arrived as an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and brought with him the belief that Arabidopsis was the ideal organism for studying plant genetics. For 20 years, George was the only scientist in the US working on Arabidopsis. In the 1980s, a new generation of plant biologists began looking to apply molecular genetics to solve real-world challenges, and finally, Arabidopsis landed in the scientific spotlight. The rest is plant biology history. The entire plant biology community owes a debt of gratitude to George Rédei, a humble and determined scientist. According to his daughter, Mari Rédei Tenkhoff (who painted the art to accompany this award) “He just kept plugging away. We have all benefitted from the scientific foundation that George Rédei built. Chris Somerville remarked “essentially everybody uses it. The discoveries Arabidopsis has allowed are too numerous to describe. We’ve revolutionized the field.”
At his death in 2008, at age 87, with more than 16,000 laboratories using Arabidopsis for research, George Rédei, professor emeritus of genetics, is heralded as a pioneer of the field. For the full story- including the quotes here- please see the excellent piece by Erik Potter: “From Apathy to Apogee”.
Awardees
2023- Dr. Scott Poethig
John B. & Margaret H. Fassitt Professor
University of Pennsylvania
Remembering George Rédei, by Scott Poethig
It is quite an honor to be the recipient of the first George Rédei Seed Stock award. I learned long ago that depositing seeds with the ABRC (or NASC) is not simply good citizenship, it is an act of self-preservation. After losing my entire collection of corn stocks to a seed borer infestation, it became clear that having back-up stocks in a safe place was a good idea. This was also driven home when my officemate in graduate school, Dave Meinke, lost many of the embryo lethal mutations he had generated during his graduate work because he stored them in his apartment in St. Louis while he was a post-doc working on soybeans. The lifespan of an Arabidopsis seed is short when stored under non-optimal conditions (e.g. a closet in an apartment with no air conditioning), and unless you have the outstanding storage facilities of the ABRC and NASC (and even if you do), it pays to send your favorite stocks to these facilities.
I am particularly pleased with this award because it gives me a chance to advertise the seed stocks for which it was awarded. In 2015, we described a new genetic tool that greatly simplifies the task of identifying mutants (or short chromosome segments) in a segregating population (Wu et al, 2015). This tool, which we termed a “Traffic Line” consists of a stock containing a pair of linked, seed-specific, green and red fluorescent transgenes. If these transgenes are sufficiently close to each other, the frequency of double recombination within the region flanked by the transgenes will be low, meaning that the stock can be used as a balancer chromosome for a non-fluorescent chromosome segment in trans to the marked segment. For example, in the self-progeny of a plant heterozygous for a TL, most of the non-fluorescent seed will be homozygous for the chromosome segment in trans to the TL, most of the moderately fluorescent seed will be heterozygous for this segment, and most of the brightly fluorescent seed will be homozygous for the marked chromosome. This has many advantages, one of which is that it allows you to quickly determine (without PCR genotyping) whether a particular phenotype is controlled by one or more genes located within this segment. In 2022, we described a set of 162 lines that span the Arabidopsis genome in over-lapping segments of approximately 1 mB (ca. 6 cM) (Poethig et al., 2022), which we deposited with the ABRC. Check out this paper—and order the lines--if you are interested making your life easier.
I interacted with George Rédei frequently when I was a post-doctoral fellow with Ed Coe, Jr. at the University of Missouri from 1981-1983. George’s lab in Curtis Hall was on the floor below Ed’s, and I would sometimes go down to talk to him. One day, he came up to ask if I knew a certain Elliot Meyerowitz, who had gotten his Ph.D. at Yale a few years before me. He was reviewing a grant from Elliot and wanted to know what I thought of him. I was surprised to learn that Elliot was working on plants, because he was well known for his work on Drosophila. I said good things, but I have never asked Elliot if he got the grant.
For many years, George was probably the only person in North America working on Arabidopsis. If you wanted seeds of Arabidopsis, you went to him. I got my stock of Columbia from Dave Meinke, and Dave got his stock from George (in 1976). Some years ago, I started using a stock of Columbia I got from Joe Ecker, figuring that this would be most similar to the line in general use. We eventually made a double haploid stock of this line and sequenced it, and were surprised to find that it had somewhere between 1,000-2,000 polymorphisms relative to the TAIR10 assembly. I called Joe to tell him and asked where he had gotten his stock. He said he had gotten it from me! Someone should produce the lineage of Arabidopsis investigators from the genome sequence of their lab strain of Col.
The last time I interacted with George was during a visit to the University of Missouri sometime in the early 1990’s, after we had begun to work on Arabidopsis. As George was giving me a tour of his plants in the greenhouse (with Arabidopsis seeds and dead plants everywhere), I noticed a plant that had siliques with 4 carpels. I asked if I could have some seed of this mutant, at which point George pulled a silique off the plant, crushed it, and dispersed the seeds into my hand. I carried them around in my open hand for the rest of the tour. When we got back to George’s office, I asked if I could perhaps have the seeds in a different form. He eventually and somewhat reluctantly gave me an envelope with this stock, and several other ones as well. This was vintage George. I suspect his years of working alone on a species that almost no one was interested in made him suspicious of the people who were now touting it as the salvation of plant biology—which, in fact, it turned out to be. This reward is a reminder that Arabidopsis became a transformative genetic system because a few investigators, like George Rédei, had the foresight to recognize its potential long before the rest of scientific community.
Scott Poethig, June, 2023
Wu, G., Rossidivito, G., Hu, T., Berlyand, Y., and R. S. Poethig (2015). Traffic Lines: new tools for genetic analysis in Arabidopsis thaliana. Genetics 200:35-45
Poethig, R. S., Cullina, W.L, Doody, E.,Floyd, T., Fouracre, J.P., Hu,T., Xu, M., Zhao, J. (2022) Short-interval Traffic Lines: versatile tools for genetic analysis in Arabidopsis thaliana. G3 12: jkac202. https://doi.org/10.1093/g3journal/jkac202