David was a great mentor who always
gives a grace period to allow students
to grow as scientists. After the masters
degree, I took an adventure into industry
to work at the new BASF Plant Sciences
LLC, where I helped the company to
established functional genomics plat-
forms. I quickly found that my nature
of curiosity and desire for free-style
research doesn’t fit an industry career
well, and moved back to academia to
work at UCSF (University of
California, San Francisco) as a microar-
ray manager, where I helped with differ-
ent neuroscience projects. Regardless of
being accepted by several top graduate
programs, my attempt to go back to
graduate school failed due to the compli-
cated issue of permanent residency
application. However, I was lucky
enough to be offered a job at
University of Tennessee to manage
their genomics hub and pursue a PhD
degree at the same time. I am supervised
by a group of excellent researchers
including Neil Rhodes, Neal Stewart
and Feng Chen for my job and graduate
study, respectively. UT turned out to be
a promised land for me, where I had a
chance to revive my love for plant
biology research. Neal is a great
mentor, who always encourages you to
go beyond your limits to develop amultidisciplinary research interest
emphasizing on both fundamental
research and application. My research
at UT covers a broad spectrum ranging
from identifying volatile producing
genes involved in tritrophic interaction,
discovering the genes for low temp-
erature germinability, genetic engineer-
ing of key cell wall genes for better
bioenergy feedstock, to developing
bioinformatics tools for genomics data
analysis. I was lucky enough to be
trained by scientists with strong back-
ground[s] in technology development
as well as both basic and applied
scientific research, which makes me
believe that my research should be
driven by new technology, scientific
questioning and needs of the society.
After wandering in different fields,
I came to realize that plant biotech-
nology is emerging as a field with
more and more significant impact on
our society and lives. As a traditional
source of food, energy and pharmaceuti-
cals for mankind, the success in plant
biotechnology research will enable
more environmentally friendly energy
supplies, more food, better nutrition,
and cheaper healthcare products, all of
which will contribute to the sustainable
growth and peaceful development of
human society.References
Dale EC, Ow DW (1991): Gene transfer with subsequent removal of the selection gene from the host
genome.Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 88 :10558–10562.
Luo K, Duan H, Zhao D, Zheng X, Deng W, Chen Y, Stewart CN Jr, Wu Y, Jiang X, He A,
McAvoy R. Pei Y, Li Y (2007): “GM-gene-deletor”: Fused loxP-FRT recognition sequences dra-
matically improves efficiency of FLP or Cre recombinase on transgene excision from pollen and
seed of tobacco plants.Plant Biotechnol J 5 :263–274.
Porteus MH, Carroll D (2005): Gene targeting using zinc finger nucleases.Nat Biotechnol 23 :
967–973.
Russell SH, Hoopes JL, Odell JT (1992): Directed excision of a transgene from the plant genome.
Mol Gen Genet 234 :49–59.
Schaefer DG (2001): Gene targeting inPhyscomitrella patens.Curr Opin Plant Biol 4 :143–150.
368 THE FUTURE OF PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY