2021/10/20 by Kenichi Tsuda · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Academic Publishing and Open Access #Academic Writing and Publishing #Educational Robotics and Engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/pcp/pcab151
Kenichi Tsuda received his B.Sc. (1999), M.Sc. (2001) and Ph.D. (2004) in Plant Science from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Ken started working on plant–microbe interactions during his postdoc in the group of Professor Fumiaki Katagiri (Fumi) (cosupervised by Professor Jane Glazebrook) at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, USA. Since then, he has been fascinated by the beauty and mystery of plant–microbe interactions. In 2011, Ken became a Group Leader and was later promoted to Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany. In 2019, Ken moved to Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China, as Professor. His major research tackles the question of how plants and associated microbes coexist and coevolve, and he seeks to gain insight into these processes by using molecular toolkits and a system-level approach. Ken joined the PCP Editorial Board as Editor in January 2021 and mostly handles manuscripts related to plant immunity, defense phytohormones and microbiota. Photo: Kenichi Tsuda, Editor, Plant and Cell Physiology (Photo credit: Hang Xu, Huazhong Agricultural University). Ken mostly handles manuscripts related to plant immunity, defense phytohormones and microbiota. When I was young and had no clear concept of DNA, I was baffled by the fact that a simple string of genetic codes largely determines the properties and behaviors of an organism. Upon internal and external stimuli, organisms decode the genetic codes in their genome from DNA to RNA; I craved to know how this happened. Because plants are sessile, we know they have to deal with whatever physical and biological stresses they encounter locally. I thought this was cool, as many things that I could not imagine must be happening inside of plants, and there was no textbook or paper that could answer my questions. This is the reason why I started studying plants and continue to do so. After all, humans cannot exist without the oxygen that plants release and plants are the foundation of most food webs—this gives me great satisfaction in studying plants. My first paper was actually published in ‘Plant and Cell Physiology’ during my Ph.D. In it, I showed that a family of Arabidopsis thaliana proteins functions as transcriptional coactivators by bridging DNA-binding transcription factors with the basal transcription machinery (Tsuda et al. 2004). Even though I was not able to reveal the physiological functions of these coactivators and many of the experiments I carried out did not work out for publication, preparing the manuscript from scratch and dealing with the reviewers’ comments by myself proved valuable training. Toward the end of my Ph.D., I still could not imagine how the entire genome information could be decoded for various physiological processes. Therefore, I wanted to study genomics and transcriptomics to understand genome-wide transcriptional reprogramming. To this end, I searched for labs that specialized in genomics and/or transcriptomics in plants. At my Ph.D. supervisor’s suggestion, I focused my search on labs in the USA (he considered me a ‘USA type’; I did not understand what he meant exactly and to this day I still don’t, but I went ahead and took his advice anyway). I sent 10 emails to researchers whom I wanted to work with but received no positive responses. However, I contacted four of the researchers who responded with a rejection email and brazenly wrote back to them saying that I would visit their labs the following month and that I wanted to have a chance to be interviewed. So I visited them and with a stroke of luck and tons of courage, I got three offers. I decided to go to Fumi’s lab as he was the smartest scientist that I had ever met and promised that I could take research projects with me when I became a principal investigator (PI). In addition, the lab members were all scientifically engaging and very friendly; they are still my close friends and even at times active collaborators. Fumi gave me enormous scientific freedom to explore the plant–microbe interaction field but at the same time provided his full support whenever I needed it. As I had only a 1-year contract at the beginning (eventually he supported me for 6.5 years), I aimed to publish a paper as soon as possible so that I could somehow survive in academia. This led to a publication describing the contribution of the phytohormone salicylic acid (SA) in a branch of plant immunity (Tsuda et al. 2008). This study raised the question of how the defense phytohormone signaling network is coordinated. I worked on my hypothesis and published results for complex interactions of four phytohormone signaling sectors during plant immunity (Tsuda et al. 2009). These two papers became my career springboard for PI as Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany. Initially, I continued my postdoc work on phytohormone signaling networks in plant immunity (Tsuda et al. 2013, Mine et al. 2017a, 2017b, 2018, Wang et al. 2018). Then, I started tackling the question of how plant immunity controls microbial metabolism and behavior, which I considered one of the most important, underexplored questions in the plant–microbe interaction field. We developed a method to profile the transcriptome and proteome of bacteria residing inside plants to reveal the global effects of plant immunity on a bacterial pathogen (Nobori et al. 2018, 2020). We also took a different approach and found a protease-based direct antibacterial mechanism (Wang et al. 2019). In nature, plants associate with a multitude of microbes including beneficial and pathogenic ones. Currently, I am obsessed with the question: how do plants distinguish between different microbes? To tackle this question, we expanded our bacterial profiling approach to include many different bacteria isolated from plants in nature (Nobori et al. 2021). I am also interested in how environmental conditions affect plant–microbe interactions (Berens et al. 2019) and how plant immune responses evolve (Winkelmüller et al. 2021). More recently, we started investigating how maize controls its microbiota and how microbiota contribute to maize health and production, thereby directly helping agriculture (Yu et al. 2021). Occasionally, we also work on developing basic plant molecular biology methods (Jia et al. 2021). One of my favorite PCP papers is the publication that studied spatial coordination of plant immune responses mediated by two phytohormones: SA and jasmonic acid (JA) (Betsuyaku et al. 2018). Antagonistic interaction between SA and JA is widely proven, but when analyzed at the whole-tissue level, SA and JA signaling pathways are activated simultaneously in some cases. The authors showed that SA and JA signaling is activated in a temporally and spatially distinct manner, which allows for the concomitant activation of the two signaling pathways at the tissue level. This finding was a real eye-opener, as I wrote in the accompanying Commentary article (Tsuda 2018). I also like the paper that established the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha as a model system for studying plant–pathogen interactions by isolating their natural fungal pathogens (Matsui et al. 2020). This system will allow researchers to ask many questions related to the origin and evolution of the plant immune system. Here are some tips for early-career scientists. (i) Find mentors who care about you, can encourage you and scientifically challenge you. Their support will help you in many ways. I have Fumi and Jane, who were my supervisors during my postdoc. Despite leaving their lab 10 years ago, they make time for regular video meetings with me and critically read our manuscripts. (ii) Find a research project that answers a big question and is unique to you. This will avoid unnecessary competitions with other scientists and will make you internationally recognized. (iii) Be nice and help others. You cannot imagine how much this will help you in the end. (iv) Never take scientific criticisms personally. You will encounter criticisms from colleagues and reviewers of your work. You need to understand that they do not criticize you but your work. It is easy to ignore, but there are usually some points that help you. (v) Pay it forward. When you become senior scientists, support and encourage early-career scientists. I believe that this will help improve academic research environments.