Alistair McCormick

Abstract

I grew up on the hilly east coast of South Africa and spent a good amount of time roaming around the local bushveld, forests and rivers in my spare time. However, my real interest in plant science began only during my university undergraduate biology degree, where I got the opportunity to have a wonderful mix of outdoor and indoor plant science experiences, including performing plant transects to help monitor game reserve ecology and many cell and molecular biology-associated practicals. I thoroughly enjoyed field work, but I found molecular biology and, in particular, the pathways of C3, C4 and CAM photosynthesis and central metabolism fascinating, so I was ultimately more drawn to this area.

During the final year of my undergraduate degree I did an internship at the South African Sugarcane Research Institute (SASRI). SASRI is part of the South African Sugar Association and has excellent facilities, ranging from state-of-the-art tissue culture experts that link up with their breeding programs, to well-established wet labs. It was an exciting time – after several years in university soaking up theory, I was suddenly thrust into the world of professional research! I enjoyed it, and I was then very fortunate to gain bursary support to do a Masters and a PhD while working at SASRI, where I focused on understanding the source-sink relationship in sugarcane. I really liked the paradigm of being involved in photosynthesis-related research that had both applied and fundamental aspects, and I decided that this is what I wanted to focus on as a career.

I enjoy the processes of planning and setting things up, putting them in motion and the rewarding feeling of getting them done efficiently. This could be an experiment or any general task that needs doing! Experiments can of course lead to failures, unexpected results or new questions that are confounding. But I think there's a wonderful bravery (and sometimes humility) in taking new data on board and starting the process again. Previously as a PhD student and a young postdoc, I typically used to go through this independently and rely on my mentors for advice. But when I started to collaborate more with others, particularly on interdisciplinary projects, it became about working through things together and strategizing as a team, which I find much more enjoyable. As my research lab has grown and I've taken on more managerial and mentoring roles, it's been fantastic to see how different researchers and students, all brilliant in their own way, engage with the ‘cycle of science’ and how working together can lead to new discoveries with real-world impacts that alone would take so much longer to achieve or perhaps not be achievable.

For scientific role models, I am lucky – I consider all of my previous supervisors, during my PhD and three postdocs, as exceptional role models and mentors. From each of them, I've taken on (borrowed!) aspects of how they communicate, strategize, and work through challenges. My PhD supervisors, Derek Watt and Mike Cramer, taught me the fundamentals of molecular and plant physiology, and how to approach scientific writing. As a postdoc, Nick Kruger introduced me to Arabidopsis and the UK research community. Chris Howe introduced me to cyanobacteria and algae and helped me to develop further as an independent researcher, and Alison Smith at the John Innes Centre encouraged and mentored me towards applying for lectureships to start my own lab.

My first first-author paper was published in New Phytologist in 2006. I was so proud when it was accepted. In many ways, that first feeling of becoming a part of the scientific community has been a driving force, so I'll unabashedly say that is my personal favourite paper. But there is so much excellent science published in New Phytologist, much of which has had an impact on one of my key areas of focus in plant engineering biology – enhancing photosynthetic CO₂ assimilation efficiencies. The Tansley review by Mackinder (2018) summarised our mechanistic understanding of biophysical algal CO₂-concentrating mechanisms (CCMs) at the time and informed much of the progress that has since been made to engineer biophysical CCMs into plants to enhance the efficiency of Rubisco. More recent studies by Goudet et al. (2020) and Capó-Bauçà et al. (2023) have further advanced our understanding of the evolution and diversity of Rubisco and biophysical CCMs.

I have a soft spot for the Silver Birch (Betula pendula) (Fig. 1). One of my first PhD students identified a strange Arabidopsis plant when sowing putatively mutagenized seeds, which led to a week or two of excitement. It turned out that the seedling was in fact a silver birch that had somehow snuck into the Arabidopsis seed packet. He cultivated it for the remainder of his PhD, and I then inherited the sapling and planted it in my garden. It's now a good 4 m tall and a nice reminder of the unexpected things that come out of plant science research.