William G.T. Willats Professor - 16.12.2009

William George Tycho Willats has been employed as a Professor at the Department of Plant Biology and Biotechnology from December 1st, 2009. The primary focus of his research will be plant cell walls and will include projects concerned with both fundamental biology and industrial applications.

 

 - Almost all plant cells are surrounded by a cell wall that is constructed from complex carbohydrates. In fact cell walls are amongst the most elaborate biological structures known and present immense challenges for research. However, the effort is well worth it because cell walls are not only essential for plant life, but also an incredibly rich biological resource of oligo- and polysaccharides that can be used in many application areas - from nutraceuticals to bio-fuels.

 

 

William Willats has a substantial track record in this field and moved to Denmark in 2003 after participating in a European Union project with Danish partners. Previous to this he studied biology at the University of Portsmouth (UK) before taking a PhD in plant nematology at the University of Leeds (UK). In recent years he has been particularly focused on understanding aspects of cell wall biosynthesis, and also on developing new high-throughput techniques for cell wall analysis that are based on carbohydrate microarrays.

 

 - Carbohydrate microarrays are powerful tools because they enable us to obtain information about cell wall structures far more rapidly than was possible previously. We have used this new technology to undertake a large scale analysis of cell walls across the plant kingdom and this has really opened our eyes to an extraordinary world of diversity and complexity.

 

In fact understanding cell wall diversity and evolution will be an important focus area of future research and current work is directed towards characterizing cell walls, and cell wall biosynthetic genes in green algae.

 

 - The green algae, and in particular the charophycean green algae (CGA) are important because their ancestors gave rise to the first land plants. This was an important step in evolution and the beginning of the plant-based terrestrial ecosystems that we see today. We believe that the CGA hold the key to understanding the earliest origins of plant cell walls.

 

For further information contact William G.T. Willats at