Prof. Dr. Jacques-Henry Weil (✝︎)

Jacques-Henry Weil is known for his contribution to plant molecular biology, particularly for his work on the mechanisms of protein synthesis in plant organelles (chloroplasts and mitochondria). More specifically he has studied two phenomena occurring in plant mitochondria, namely (i) RNA editing (which consists in C to U changes at the messenger RNA level, thus correcting the genetic information carried by the transcripts) and (ii) import of transfer RNAs (tRNAs) into mitochondria (plant mitochondrial protein synthesis requires the import of a number of nuclear-encoded tRNAs, because the plant mitochondrial genome does not code for a complete set of tRNAs).