The desire to combine plant biology with structural biology made it relatively easy for Philippe Rieu to choose a laboratory for his postdoctoral research. “I could have gone to the United States or the United Kingdom, but I wanted to stay in Europe. I looked at all the labs and there are only a few doing plant biology plus structural biology. The lab team where I am now has experts in those two fields,” Rieu says.
After his PhD in France, Rieu moved to the Structural Plant Biology Laboratory at the University of Geneva, under the leadership of former EMBO Young Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellow Michael Hothorn. He was encouraged to apply for an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship.
“The Fellowship is great for carrier development and for making new connections,” Rieu says. “I wrote my proposal when I had just arrived in the lab. The topic was completely new for me, and it was good to have to do this at the very beginning.”
Rieu says the Fellowship gives him some independence in the lab to choose his own line of enquiry. He combines techniques from genetics, biochemistry and structural biology to study the role of inositol pyrophosphates in regulating the phosphate starvation response in plants, using Arabidopsis as the model organism. He conducts basic research but is conscious of the potential wider application.
“Understanding the starvation response is important for agriculture. The mechanism is conserved between Arabidopsis and other land plants so our research might be able to be applied by others,” he says. “Most fertilizers now in use contain phosphates and nitrates and are extracted from mines in only a few countries. If we want crops that are more tolerant to limited phosphate it is crucial to understand how the mechanisms work at the molecular level.”
Rieu says the lab in Geneva allows him to collect the protein structures of specific mutations and then immediately test the effect on the plant phenotype. “That ability is a great strength of our lab. Usually in plant science people must collaborate with other labs to obtain structures, but we can do both,” he says.
Rieu decided on a career in plant biology during his preparation for university studies in France. “They are complex organisms and the phenotypes you find in plant biology are more interesting to me than other branches of molecular biology,” he says.
