Fine Read­ing: The Life and Times of Paul Buch­ner

by Roberto

One of the great perks of writ­ing for this blog at this stage in my ca­reer is that I have nearly zero con­straints when it comes to the sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture I read. My for­mula is sim­ple: when­ever I find some­thing in­ter­est­ing, I read about it. Oth­er­wise, not likely. For­tu­nately, there are so many fas­ci­nat­ing top­ics there is no short­age of read­ing ma­te­r­ial and, this is an­other perk, there's (al­most) never any hurry. In pre­paring our re­cent post on ecto­symb­ionts, I dis­cov­ered Jan Sapp's 2002 per­spec­tive: "Paul Buch­ner (1886 –1978) and hered­i­tary sym­bio­sis in in­sects." I sus­pect that many STC read­ers will im­me­di­ately rec­og­nize the name of Paul Buch­ner, af­ter whom Paul Bau­mann named the now well-known aphid endo­symb­iont Buch­n­era. But I also sus­pect most will not know too much about Buchner's sem­i­nal con­tri­bu­tions to the field of in­sect endo­sym­bionts, so I highly rec­om­mend this hid­den gem. I most cer­tainly learned a lot from read­ing it; in a lit­tle over five printed pages Sapp beauti­fully sum­ma­rizes not only Buchner's life but also the his­tor­i­cal con­text that saw the birth and de­vel­op­ment of the field.

Fig. 1. Schiza­phis gramium, an aphid species that har­bors the en­dosym­biont Buch­n­era aphidi­cola. Source

Here's a per­sonal vi­gnette that I hope will stim­u­late those of you teach­ing or learn­ing the sub­ject of in­sect-mi­crobe sym­bioses to read this his­tor­i­cal piece. Some­time in the early 1980s – I think it was when I was a post-doc, but the ex­act year is lost to me now – I had the good for­tune to walk into Paul Baumann's of­fice at Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis. The date is im­por­tant be­cause it was in 1986 that Paul phoned Nancy Moran in need of her ex­per­tise in en­to­mol­ogy; their en­su­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion broke the field of in­sect en­dosym­bionts wide open. So, my visit was early in the mod­ern his­tory of this field. I re­mem­ber be­ing im­me­dia­te­ly fas­ci­nated with the story of aphids sub­sist­ing on tryp­to­phan-de­fi­cient plant sap thanks to en­dosym­bionts. These in­tra­cel­lu­lar bac­te­ria were es­sen­tially tryp­to­phan fac­to­ries, in part be­cause they had a plas­mid with sev­eral copies of the genes en­cod­ing an­thrani­late syn­thase, the first en­zyme in the com­mit­ted path­way of tryp­to­phan biosyn­the­sis. Why my fas­cination? As a grad­u­ate stu­dent I had worked on plas­mids and as a post-doc I was work­ing on the reg­u­la­tion of the tryp­to­phan operon. To me: plas­mids + tryp­to­phan = fas­ci­nat­ing. How nar­row my think­ing! Con­se­quently, when I started teach­ing about in­sect en­do­sym­bionts some years later, I was very nar­row and cov­ered only the mol­e­c­u­lar ge­net­ics. How I wish I had taken the time back then to study the his­tory of how en­dosym­bionts were dis­cov­ered. That knowl­edge would have greatly en­riched my lec­tures. My mes­sage to teach­ers and stu­dents alike: dig deep into the his­tory of your sub­ject mat­ter, it will greatly broaden your hori­zons!
 

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