Prof. Dr. Winslow R. Briggs (✝︎)

Winslow Briggs has been contributing to our knowledge of plant responses to light for over fifty years. His early work involved characterizing phototropism (growth directed by light direction) physiologically, a response activated by blue light. Later he made numerous contributions to the physiology and the biochemical characterization of phytochrome, a red-far red-reversible pigment involved in practically every stage in a plant’s life cycle. Recently he returned to studying blue light-induced responses and identified and characterized the phototropins, flavins-binding proteins, as the responsible photoreceptors. He discovered that the two chromophore modules of phototropin were remarkably similar to modules found in otherwise unrelated proteins in a large number of bacteria, including plant and animal pathogens. He was part of a team that showed that a histidine kinase in the animal pathogen Brucella abortus that carried the module was required for bacterial virulence and that expression of that virulence required activation of the histidine kinase by blue light.