Meyerowitz Becomes Wolf Prize Laureate in Agriculture

Elliot Meyerowitz, George W. Beadle Professor of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, has been named a Wolf Prize Laureate in Agriculture for 2024 for his "many outstanding and seminal contributions to the field of genetics and our understanding of the molecular basis of plant growth and development." He shares the prize with two other laureates, Joanne Chory of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Venkatesan Sundaresan of the UC Davis.

For over four decades, Meyerowitz's research has focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying plant development. He is perhaps best known for pioneering the use of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model plant for research. This small flowering plant in the mustard family, generally regarded as a weed, is now used in thousands of laboratories around the world to understand plant biology and behavior.

"Certainly half, maybe more, of what we know about plant genes, growth, and development now comes from the study of this organism," Meyerowitz says. Indeed, a 2018 article in Genetics, "Biology in Bloom: A Primer on the Arabidopsis thaliana Model System," states "Arabidopsis has become the most widely studied plant in modern biology despite its absence from the dinner table."

Biologists came to the study of Arabidopsis primarily because, as Meyerowitz says, "its rapid growth—it has many generations each year—and its small size made it particularly well suited for growing in basements and laboratories." Also, it was known to have ordinary Mendelian genetics. Like humans, and like the pea plants studied by Gregor Mendel, Arabidopsis has two sets of chromosomes, unlike polyploid organisms such as tobacco or wheat. "This was a benefit, since genetic manipulations of polyploids are far more complex than that of diploids."

Other useful traits that made Arabidopsis a model organism only came to light after Meyerowitz and others began to work with it in the lab. "Our first Arabidopsis paper in the early 1980s was on the size of the Arabidopsis genome, and we found that it had a very small amount of DNA," Meyerowitz says, "which made its molecular analysis considerably easier and less expensive." In addition, it was quickly shown by other labs that Arabidopsis could be transformed with external DNA: "You could take a gene out and put it back into the plant after you had changed it," Meyerowitz explains.

Once persuaded of the usefulness of Arabidopsis, Meyerowitz and his colleagues moved in the 1990s to create a database of Arabidopsis studies and results so that "other scientists could use it to jumpstart their own studies," Meyerowitz says. "And with the National Science Foundation, we worked to make the materials easily available through stock centers for seeds and cloned DNA."

In his own work with Arabidopsis, Meyerowitz "solved the century-old mystery of how plants create specific leaf and flower patterns, and … cloned and characterized many of these genes," according to his award citation.

Meyerowitz began his graduate studies in developmental biology at Yale relying on Drosophila melanogaster,the fruit fly, as his organism of choice. But he quickly noticed a curious fact: "If you looked at the literature on plant developmental biology, there was really no use of genetics at all," Meyerowitz says. "It seemed like there was a major opportunity for melding developmental biology and the genetics of plants. People were using classic plant genetics to increase crop yields in very sophisticated ways but without really knowing what they were doing to the plant at a molecular level. I began working with plants when I first came to Caltech in 1980, and, over the course of the next decade, I eased out of the Drosophila world and into the plant world."

From there, the discoveries began as his laboratory characterized flower development and receptors for plant hormones and described cell-cell interactions in plants, both through hormone and peptide signaling and the mechanics of cells in direct contact with one another, responding to changes in their shared cell wall to drive overall morphogenesis in the plant along with the shapes of leaves, flowers, and floral organs. This work continues to this day in the Meyerowitz lab.

Meyerowitz did not begin his study of plants to improve agriculture, "but I always knew that somebody would pick up on what we were finding and use it agriculturally, he says. "Any fundamental information we can acquire is ultimately necessary for progress in agriculture."

"To win the Wolf Prize is heartwarming for me because I'm a basic scientist," Meyerowitz says. "The idea that some of my work is actually proving important in human welfare is a nice thing. There are a lot of parts of the world where people don't have enough to eat. Even beyond that, if you track the price of wheat over the past 50 years and the ratio of peace to war in the world, there's a strong correlation. Plants are also absolutely at the core of the carbon cycle and therefore climate change. Pretty much everything having to do with human welfare comes through plants. Animals like us are truly parasites on the plant world. We don't even make our own amino acids. We have to eat plants or eat another animal, usually who eats plants, to get our vital nutrients. Plants aren't like that. Everything they need they make from sunlight, air, water, and minerals."