Beat Keller

Beat Keller (born 14 September 1958) is a Swiss molecular biologist and professor of plant molecular biology at the University of Zurich. He is known for his research on disease resistance in cereals.

Life Keller studied biology at the University of Basel from 1978 to 1982. His dissertation dealt with shape-determining proteins of the bacteriophage capsid T4: The role of gene products 67 and 68. In 1985 he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. In 1986, he continued his training as a molecular biologist with an EMBO Longterm Fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, where he worked in the plant biology research group of Christopher John Lamb. In 1989, Keller returned to Switzerland and founded a plant biotechnology group at the Swiss Federal Research Station for Agronomy (today Agroscope). The group, which specialized in cereal genetics, disease resistance and molecular markers, was headed by Keller until 1997. In 1995, he became a lecturer at ETH Zurich and in 1997 accepted an appointment as Professor of Molecular Plant Biology at the University of Zurich. From 1997 to 2014, he was Director of the Institute of Plant Biology at the University of Zurich and from 2002 to 2006 and from 2016 to 2018 Chairman of the Department of Biology. From 2000 to 2006, Keller was Vice President of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT) and is codirector of the research program "Evolution in Action". From 2014 to 2022, he was a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, India, and was admitted as a member of the section Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina on 23 June 2015.

Scientific contribution Beat Keller's research focuses on the molecular basis of disease resistance in the cereals wheat, maize, barley and rye. This involves characterizing genes that are responsible for the formation of specific immune receptors. This included the isolation of the first resistance genes against fungal diseases in wheat and against leaf spot disease in maize. In 2021, novel resistance genes were identified in wheat against powdery mildew and wheat leaf rust. In addition, an important quantitative resistance gene, Lr34, was isolated, which is used intensively in wheat cultivation worldwide and has a novel resistance mechanism. Modified resistance genes were tested in field trials (www.protectedsite.ch) in transgenic wheat and barley plants.

In complementary research directions, the molecular mechanisms of the evolution of the powdery mildew pathogen in its adaptation to new host species were identified and the molecules of the pathogen recognized by immune receptors were characterized. The work on the wheat genome within the framework of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium led to the production of the first high-quality wheat genome sequence.

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