Marc Somssich puts plant science results in the historic time frame they were first discovered and discussed. “Our Section awards this year’s prize "for his excellent stories that highlight historical work and important papers in plant biology on social networks," as the Section’s speaker; Professor Stefan Rensing explains. To do so, the scientist splits his stories into easy to comprehend and digestible bits of information and narrates them in so-called threads.
Before Somssich started to publish scientific findings on social platforms such as Twitter and Bluesky, he compiled texts about important findings in the plant sciences triggered by why-questions from his students. He therefore circulated the articles for example about the histories of Arabidopsis thaliana, of the CaMV 35S promoter, or plant transformation among his students first, and later also among colleagues. Since he received phenomenal responses, Somssich decided to preprint the articles and later compiled them as “The Dawn of Plant Molecular Biology: How Three Key Methodologies Paved the Way” paper published in the scientific journal Current Protocols in 2022 (DOI: 10.1002/cpz1.417). He continued the series, which are used by many scientists in teaching plant biology lessons, since they help to understand why some methods, protocols or model plants are used -comprehensible only by knowing the historic contexts in which they were first discovered. For example the history until Arabidopsis thaliana was established and accepted as a model plant (narrated on Bluesky).
Subsequently, Somssich decided to disseminate his texts also via X, at a time this platform was still named Twitter, depicted by a blue bird and the contents publicly available. The scientist, who did his PhD at University of Düsseldorf, started all over again with the not-for-profit explanations of plant science results, called #PlantScienceClassics on the microblogging platform Bluesky early in 2023, where he receives attention and recommendations from early career as well as from established scientists. Many are also thankful for Marc’s efforts in helping plant scientists to build a network on Bluesky by first curating contents and recently by providing so-called “Starter Packs”, which offer lists of people or accounts with similar interests. Marc Somssich therefore made it easier for them to abandon X and move to Bluesky (see: Starter Pack 1 and Starter Pack 2).
Despite Somssich was told several times not to put effort or time on his historic stories and their dissemination, but to focus only on his research and to write only scientific papers, he did not refrain from writing about historic contexts of plant science results and put them into tiny stories on Twitter, for example about the Nobel Prize winning paper from Barbara McClintock on “Jumping Genes”. Famous is also his story on the “history of vernalization” that reminds of the fatal consequences when populism and ideology overruled science on the political and societal stages - also known as Lysenkoism in Russia – with severe effects, previously published on Zendo and edited on Bluesky as a real science drama in four acts .
Somssich, who serves as an editor on the board of The Plant Cell, also portrayed several plant scientists for example Daisy Roulland-Dussoix, who should have received the Nobel Prize for her findings that paved the way for the development of recombinant DNA and cloning technologies, that was given to others, Douglas Prasher, Emmy Stein, or Albert Coons.
Of course Somssich also offers a thread on the “short history of plant light microscopy” (published in Current Protocols DOI: 10.1002/cpz1.5770), since he established novel microscopy techniques for in planta use during his PhD, studied the role of the plant cell wall as signalling hub relaying external signals into the cell and now at the MPIPZ studies the role of plant endodermal barriers and chemical defense mechanisms to repel the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, a pathogen especially in agricultural settings. He also made available a Starter Pack of scientists specialized in “Plant Microscopy and Imaging”.
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All of Marc Somssich’s stories on BlueSky
All of Marc Somssich’s activities are listed here: https://linktr.ee/somssich