Norbert Perrimon
THE 2004 George W. Beadle Medal is awarded to Norbert Perrimon in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the Drosophila genetics community. His continuous development of new genetic and molecular tools have allowed Drosophila laboratories to make rapid progress in many different fields of research. Norbert Perrimon has been a key figure in the genetic analysis of many signaling pathways in Drosophila. He not only has developed tools for these analyses, but also has made them readily available to the whole Drosophila community. It is for these achievements that the GSA honors Norbert Perrimon with this prize.
Norbert Perrimon began his scientific career in the laboratory of Madeleine Gans at the University of Paris. Madeleine Gans was one of the outstanding geneticists of her time, and when Norbert joined her group, her laboratory was involved in screens for female sterile and maternal effect mutations on the X chromosome of Drosophila. A deep appreciation for the power of genetic screens and the realization that unhindered sharing of tools and mutations allows rapid progress remained characteristic of Norbert’s own research throughout the years. It was also in the Gans laboratory that Norbert first started to use a dominant female sterile mutation as a tool for clonal analysis in the germline. After he moved to the laboratory of Anthony Mahowald, then at Case Western University for his postdoctoral work, he perfected the dominant female sterile approach for the X chromosome. This allowed him to test a large number of mutations that are homozygous lethal, but yield interesting phenotypes when made homozygous in the germ-line after induction of mitotic recombination. Among the mutations that Norbert and his colleagues analyzed in these first large-scale experiments were mutations in pole hole, the Drosophila Raf homolog, as well as mutations in hopscotch (the Drosophila JAK homolog) and disc large (which is involved in determining epithelial cell polarity). After establishing his own laboratory at Harvard Medical School, Norbert Perrimon continued the study of several of the maternal genes involved in embryonic patterning, in particular genes involved in signaling pathways such as Raf and corkscrew, which led to further studies of the Torso and Egfr pathways; dishevelled, zeste white 3 (sgg), and porcupine, which initiated important work on Wingless signaling; and hopscotch and marelle (Stat92E), which established the analysis of JAK/STAT signaling in Drosophila. These experiments led to many new insights in the signal transduction area and influenced cell biological thinking about signal production, transport, and reception in general.
However, while pursuing these important scientific questions, Norbert Perrimon, in a unique manner, also spent considerable time and effort making effective tools for developmental analyses in Drosophila. While the ovoD technique to induce homozygous germline clones by X-ray-induced mitotic recombination worked reasonably efficiently for the X chromosome, the available dominant female sterile mutations on other chromosome arms were tedious and much less useful to employ. Norbert decided that it would therefore be worth transforming the dominant ovoD mutation on to the other chromosome arms, and he also realized that the newly introduced FLP-FRT system in flies would be extremely useful for the induction of germline clones. In a heroic effort, Tze-Bin Chou and Norbert succeeded in combining the two systems into a useful tool that allows Drosophila laboratories a relatively easy approach to studying the effects of their favorite mutations in germline clones. At the same time, Andrea Brand and Norbert undertook another risky experiment, transforming the yeast GAL4 gene, a powerful transcriptional regulator, into flies and inserting the GAL4 UAS target sites in front of test genes such as Raf and lacZ. The outcome of their efforts transformed the way Drosophila laboratories have been designing mis- and overexpression experiments, and countless screens and investigations into gene function have derived from this original set of experiments.
Very notably, Norbert Perrimon not only generated useful stocks and constructs that he used in his own research, but also very generously gave out those tools to the scientific community as soon as they were available. His inventiveness in developing the tools and immediate sharing of the stocks have impacted the way all Drosophila laboratories perform experiments and have led to numerous new insights that have affected the Genetics community as a whole.
- Copyright © 2004 by the Genetics Society of America
