Columns::August 27, 2001
Minority enrollment
Gordhan Patel, grad school dean, named VP for research
Dyer to step down as vice president for instruction
Casting your vote
Office manager in special education department receives college staff award
Watkins named School of Leadership director
Newsmakers
A new class of leaders
New Media Institutute rocks
Symposium focuses on vet research
Campus News
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| While Scott Merkle continues to work toward improved tissue-culture techniques, he has expanded his research to include gene-transfer techniques, which have the potential to produce trees with improved disease and insect resistance. |
Forest resources professor’s career branches off in different directions
By Helen Fosgate
hfosgate@smokey.forestry.uga.edu
Scott Merkle jumps up, grabbing a cluster of leaves at the end of a branch. His hat tumbles to the ground, but he holds fast to the branch and turns to address the students of Dendrology 3010.
“Okay, now that you’ve all seen my bald spot, who can tell me what distinguishing feature helps us identify this tree species?”
The students laugh, moving in to see Merkle point out the bell shape at the base of the leaf, the “dead giveaway,” according to him, that this is a Southern red oak. “That was a bit more challenging than I thought,” he says, flipping his cap back over his bald “spot,” which covers much of his head. “Let’s move on to a real confidence builder.”
A forest biotechnologist in the Warnell School of Forest Resources, Merkle says he knew from the age of about 12 that someday he’d work with trees. “It was my family’s fault, really,” he says with a shrug. “Whenever I complained about people, they encouraged me to be a forest ranger, so I could sit alone in a fire tower all day.”
When he graduated from William and Mary with a biology degree in 1976, Merkle did go on to major in forestry at Virginia Tech, where he earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in the relatively new field of forest genetics. His main interest was in tissue culture or tree cloning, but when he completed his Ph.D. in 1982, he found only a handful of researchers in the country working in this area. Worse yet, the forest industry was mired in a deep economic depression. It took him four months to find a position—as a post-doc at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he analyzed population genetics on Douglas fir trees as part of a tree improvement program.
The Merkles lived like vagabonds for the next year and a half between Texas (where his wife was working), Oregon and then Georgia, where Merkle applied for a post-doc position in UGA’s School of Forest Resources. Here he found a couple of the very few researchers in the country experimenting with tissue culture in trees.
“Claud Brown was a real pioneer in this field,” he says. “He and Harry Sommer were the first to tissue-culture pines in 1975. They went on to successfully culture sweetgum, black locust and several other species. Their work made a big international splash and generated funds for a post-doc position, for which I was hired in 1984.”
By 1987 Merkle was integral to the fledgling forest biotech program and joined the faculty as an assistant professor. While he continues to work toward improved tissue-culture techniques, he has expanded his research to include gene transfer. Gene-transfer techniques have the potential to produce trees with improved disease and insect resistance—and even the ability to clean up contaminated soils, as Merkle and UGA geneticists Rich Meagher and Clayton Rugh showed in 1998.
The researchers engineered yellow-poplar trees that can take up toxic mercury from the soil, convert it to a relatively inert form and release it as a vapor into the atmosphere. Their ground-breaking research was featured on the cover of Nature Biotechnology in fall 1998.
In addition to carrying on an active research program, Merkle teaches several courses and serves as graduate coordinator in the school. Only a handful of colleagues know he was also the drummer in a rock and roll band, Wet Dog, which Merkle says never practiced except when they played, usually in someone’s basement.
Despite his considerable research achievements, Merkle still ponders the fundamental questions of plant growth and development.
“The one goal I really spend a lot of time on is figuring out how to take a piece of a tree that’s already determined to be one thing and make it something else,” Merkle explains. “Plants, like animals, are always laying down cells that will become something—a leaf, a branch. But it’s possible to make cells forget what they’re supposed to become and do something else.
“Right now, we don’t really understand what changes in gene expression make that happen. And when they do happen, we don’t always know why or how. Understanding these mechanisms is really where I want to go in my work.”
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