Profile of Paul Schulze-Lefert

Abstract

Growing up on his family’s farm in northwestern Germany, Paul Schulze-Lefert received an early introduction to plant biology that blossomed into a lifelong interest. In a fruitful career as a plant biologist, Schulze-Lefert has played a crucial role in elucidating mechanisms by which the plant immune system detects and fights harmful microbes, and his findings could lead to the development of pathogen-resistant crops. More recently, he has focused on fundamental questions about the complex interactions between plants and their microbial communities, called the plant microbiota. In his Inaugural Article (1), Schulze-Lefert describes the diversification of the bacterial microbiota in the roots of four plant species representing one phylogenetic lineage and shows that microbiota diversification is driven by host species–specific ecological adaptation and phylogenetic distance. In addition, he identified a few core bacterial families that were conserved over at least a 30-million-year evolutionary range and across biogeographical host specialization. For his many discoveries in the field of plant innate immunity and plant–microbe interactions, Schulze-Lefert was elected as a Foreign Associate to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. Paul Schulze-Lefert. Image courtesy of Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. Schulze-Lefert, now the director of the Department of Plant–Microbe Interactions at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research [Max-Planck-Institut fur Zuchtungsforschung (MPIPZ)] in Cologne, Germany, says he gained an early appreciation of the importance of plant domestication and breeding in human history. “Food production is of utmost importance in the face of a growing world population, and will be one of the grand challenges over the next decades,” he says. “There is tremendous scope to improve not only yield, but also how we produce food.” To that end, Schulze-Lefert is focused on understanding how plants protect themselves from microbial pathogens. Current methods of crop protection use mainly chemicals to control …