Historical Survey of the Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics
In 1953 the President of the Catholic University of Leuven assigned a mandate to Professor Joseph M. Heuts to install a chair in Genetics at the Institute of Agriculture in support of research in plant and animal breeding.
In response, Professor J. M. Heuts, zoologist and geneticist (1917-1996), founded the F.A. Janssens Memorial Laboratory of Genetics in tribute to the scientific merits of Frans Alfons Janssens (1863-1924), Professor Biology and Cytology at the Catholic University of Leuven. Around the turn of this century in 1909, Janssens discovered chiasmata in prophase meiocytes as an important source of genetic variation in sexual reproduction. His findings were later on gratefully used in the Theory of linkage by Thomas H. Morgan at Columbia University.
Over the nineteen fifties and sixties under the directorship of J. M. Heuts, the F.A. Janssens Laboratory became a prominent research centre in classical genetics focussing on quantitative genetics using the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Inheritance of variation in polygenic traits such as ventral bristle number in correlation with longevity and fertility as a function of parental age at reproduction, allowed the construction of sound hypotheses on mechanisms operational in the inheritance of quantitative variation and biological evolution. Concurrently research was carried out on higher plants and crops to study effects of the generation interval at reproduction on quantitative phenotypic variation among the progeny.
In the seventies microbial genetic analysis found its introduction in the F.A. Janssens Laboratory of Genetics focussing on molecular cytology of bacterial chromosomes and the study of Escherichia coli cell division mutants. Subsequently with the advent of genetic tools of in vitro DNA recombination in the late seventies, a link was made in the early eighties to Agrobacterium tumefaciens molecular genetics and the genetic understanding of communication between rhizobacteria and their host plants.
During the eighties the laboratory anticipated research spin-offs meeting the concern of sustainable agriculture and ecologically sound food production strategies. It became the start of three major research areas in the F.A. Janssens Laboratory of Genetics: biological nitrogen fixation, biocontrol of fungal plant pathogens and biodegradation of pollutants.
During the nineties research interests in these areas further expanded with a major emphasis on signal transduction pathways in bacteria and plants. In the late nineties, following a steady increase in the number of scientific and technical personnel, the laboratory was structured in five research groups: Plant Fungus Interactions (Arabidopsis), Symbiotic Interactions (rhizobia), Associative Interactions (azospirilla), PGPR and Biodegradation (pseudomonads and rhodococci) and Probiotics (lactobacilli and Salmonella ). The probiotics group was most created within our laboratory, taking advantage of the molecular resemblance between plant and mammalian defense strategies.
With the start of the new millennium, and given the evolution that marked the activities of the F. A. Janssens Laboratory of Genetics over the past fifty years, it was decided to rename our laboratory as Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics.
2004: Bioinformatics and System Biology
In 2008, returning from Harvard University to the Catholic University of.Leuven, Kevin Verstrepen started up a seventh group: Genetics and Genomics. Bioincubator
