On June 25, biology professor Mary Lou Guerinot received the Philip N. Benfey Arabidopsis Community Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee for her research on plant metal transporters. Arabidopsis, a small flowering weed, is commonly used amongst scientists “to study how plants grow and develop, photosynthesize, produce valuable nutrients, or withstand stress and pathogens.” To qualify for the Lifetime Achievement award, recipients must be “Arabidopsis researchers” with “distinguished” research spanning decades and have impacted trainees through “positive mentoring” and community service.
The Committee cited Guerinot’s “use of genetic approaches to study metal transport in plants” and “strong support for women in science” in the announcement of her selection. The Dartmouth sat down with Guerinot to discuss the significance of this award, the impact of her research and her role as a mentor to students.
What does receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you?
MLG: This award is really special because they asked some of my former students and postdocs, people who had worked with me, to write about me, and that’s the basis for the award. It’s not just my peers deciding; it’s the people that actually have worked with me. So it is very special.
Reflecting on your career, what scientific discovery that you made are you most proud of, and why?
MLG: I think it’s not just one single discovery, but we did figure out how plants take up iron from the soil. In some of the early work that we did, we identified the transporter that brings the iron in from the soil and to the root. We also figured out what other steps are needed to get that iron then up to the shoots, and finally into the seed. Probably what I’m most proud of is not actually the work we did ourselves, but the fact that the genes we discovered have been used by others to actually improve the iron content of crops like cassava and rice and wheat.
How has the field of plant ionomics changed throughout your career?
MLG: With ionomics, we have all these different wild plant mutants: they have a mutation in different genes. We don’t know what gene — we just screen them, put it through the Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry machine and then, using genetics, we figure out what gene is mutated, and then we prove that that’s the cause of the mutation. I think one of the things that’s changed a lot is that it’s really cheap now to sequence genes. Before it would take us quite a while using classical genetics to figure out where that mutation is; now we can just sequence the whole genome and ask: where’s the mutation?
One of the criteria for the Lifetime Achievement Award is to have provided “positive mentoring” to trainees. How has mentorship shaped your career, and how have you balanced your research with supporting the next generation of scientists?
MLG: None of this work is done by me alone; I have to have a team. Science is really a team effort. The way that I think works best is the older students teach the younger students. There’s a lot of peer-to-peer training that goes on that also allows us to move forward more quickly, but I also enjoy letting students figure out if biology is something they want to do … I can’t imagine what my career would have been like if I didn’t have the students in the lab, and it’s really fun to stay in touch and see what they do with their Dartmouth degree.
What advice would you give to students interested in a career in STEM?
MLG: The first thing I always tell students is to get some hands-on experience and see if they really like STEM work because although we try and make labs interesting, there’s nothing like actually getting in the lab. So I think that’s critical, and Dartmouth does a really good job. There are lots of opportunities for students to get some funding to help work in the lab.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
