Joanne Chory
Wolf Prize Laureate in Agriculture 2024
Joanne Chory
Affiliation at the time of the award:
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA
Award citation:
“for key discoveries on plant developmental biology of relevance to crop improvements”.
Prize share:
Joanne Chory
Elliot M. Meyerowitz
Venkatesan Sundaresan
Joanne Chory (born in 1955, USA), a plant geneticist, is the Director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator. Recognized as one of the most influential plant biologists of the modern era, Chory studies the genetic codes of plants and uses plants to help fight climate change.
Adaptation is the phenotypic change by which an organism becomes better suited to its environment. This may happen through a combination of genetic adaptation and plasticity. Chory studies the way in which plants respond to environmental changes with an emphasis on changes in composition and light intensity. These allow the plants to distinguish between seasons and produce information about their location relative to the light source and to other plants (as in the case of competition with neighboring plants for photosynthetic light). According to the light conditions, plants will adjust their growth rate, the rate of photosynthesis, and flowering time. While this response is important for the plant’s survival, it may lead to a decrease in yield, for example, if crops grow at a high density.
Chory and her coworkers have determined several molecular pathways that explain how plants adapt to and grow optimally in diverse environments. These days, they use this knowledge to tackle climate change, an urgent threat to the rapidly growing human population. Chory’s studies are important for attaining food security in various environments and when yields are compromised by global climate change.
Chory has made important discoveries on the mechanisms of plant growth, development, and response to the environment. She and her team comprehensively dissected light signaling pathways through a combination of molecular genetics, biochemistry, ‘omics techniques, and elegant cell biology. They discovered a negative growth regulation, acting in the absence of light, which controls leaf and chloroplast development and photo-regulated gene expression in dicotyledonous plants. The identification of specific repressor proteins that were antagonized by the absorption of light by photoreceptors was a seminal discovery. This revolutionized photomorphogenesis and light signaling fields.
More broadly, this finding translates into the hugely agronomically important trait of shade avoidance, which is thought to be the major trait underpinning increased maize yields. In addition, follow-up studies in several laboratories found that these genes also play an important role in human cells.
The team uncovered the signaling pathway for brassinosteroids. Chory and her coworkers have also made major contributions to understanding auxin and cytokinin biosynthesis and function, nuclear/chloroplast interactions and retrograde signaling, circadian (biological clock) regulation of growth, and natural variation of adaptation.
Chorey’s latest research deals with inducing plants to increase the accumulation of carbon dioxide in their roots. Despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions to avoid extreme climate change and curb global warming, the solution may come from the other direction, namely by lowering carbon dioxide levels from the air and storing it for the long term. In light of the fact that plants already know how to utilize carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Chorey’s lab is studying how to engineer plants so that they manage to accumulate more carbon dioxide in their roots. Such plants, if planted on a large scale, could remove enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and may lead to a solution to this critical effect of climate change.
Joanne Chory is awarded the Wolf Prize for her contributions to plant developmental biology that have paved the way for current novel work and for major advances in understanding processes key for crop improvement: light signaling, hormone signaling, shade avoidance, flowering time, growth regulation, and disease resistance.