Q&A with Quantitative Plant Biology Associate Editor: Ali Ferjani

Launched in 2020, Quantitative Plant Biology is an open access journal, co-published by Cambridge University Press and The John Innes Centre with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for high quality research on ground-breaking discoveries and predictions in quantitative plant science.

We sit down with Associate Editor Ali Ferjani to learn more about his research, and hear his thoughts on what this data-driven journal means for the plant science community.

Can you tell us a bit about your background, and what your current research is focused on?

I was born and grew up in Ben Arous, a city in the Southern suburb of Tunis. People familiar with world history would imagine CARTHAGE (present-day Tunisia), the ancient empire and its legendary warrior Hannibal Barca (183 B.C. ~ 247 B.C.), known for leading the Carthaginian army and a team of elephants across southern Europe and the Alps in the Second Punic War against Rome.

Well, unlike the majority of teens, I spent a great deal of my time with my relatives in countryside, doing silly things, helping agricultural work, and capturing goldfinch (my favorite wild bird), which are now vanishing from north Africa due to over exploitation. That’s not my fault! I graduated in June 1996 from The Faculty of Sciences of Tunis (Dept. of Natural Sciences), and was hoping for an escapade.

While the majority of Tunisian students go to France for their graduate studies, as most of us are bilingual, I was looking at things somewhat differently. Meanwhile, I learned that the Japanese government was offering scholarships to study in Japan. Wow! As a big fan of Japan and “martial arts” I did not need much time to make a decision, yet the scholarship was very competitive. Luckily, things went well and I was accepted for the scholarship. I remember the day I came to Japan – It was a real cultural shock -. April 4th, 1997 was a turning point in my life, and the beginning of my adventure in Japan as an International student.

Okayama was my first home city, where I spent three years (1998-2000), as a master’s course student, to study photoinhibition of PSII complex using spinach leaves. At the same time, research topics on several model organisms started to attract me, particularly those with a genome sequence available, such as the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, which was the first photosynthetic organism with a genome sequence available.

I moved to Okazaki city as a PhD-student (2000-2003) of the SOKENDAI at the National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB), and started another challenge with a new research topic on salt stress using Synechocystis. NIBB was such an exciting place, I was surrounded by world-class scientists, needless to mention that the Lab. of Prof. Yoshinori Ohsumi (The winner of the 2016 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine) was next door on the third floor of NIBB, and that he was a member of the judging committee for my PhD thesis defense. After obtaining my D. Phil. degree in the spring of 2003, I spent another year as a postdoc, then started thinking about the next destination, since my boss Prof. Norio Murata was approaching retirement.

The NIBB seminar was a trigger to learn about what other labs are working on, and I was particularly fascinated by all the leaf development related topics in Dr. Hirokazu Tsukaya’s Lab. I joined his research team in the spring of 2004, as a JSPS Post-Doc “2004-2006”. Since that time, I have been working on Arabidopsis leaf development, where size regulation and “compensation” are my major foci. Now, as a PI, I am leading a small and ambitious research team at Tokyo Gakugei University since September 2008.

What has been your biggest challenge/greatest achievement in your career so far?

Understanding how organ size and /or shape are determined in plants has been my biggest challenge. Inorganic pyrophosphate (PPi) was discovered in the 19th century, and was found to accumulate in rat livers1; this was the first report on PPi accumulation in a biological system. Yet, the actual target of excess PPi in vivo and the physiological roles of PPi hydrolyzing enzymes (PPases) remained enigmatic in all kingdoms, and little was known about the master regulator of PPi homeostasis in plants. Provided that, I think that one of my greatest achievements was to discover that the vacuolar proton pump FUGU5/AVP1/H+-PPase is the master regulator of PPi homeostatis in plant cells2,3, and that the gluconeogenic enzyme UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (UGPase) is the major target when excess PPi exerts its inhibitory effects in vivo4.

1Cori et al. Biochim. Biophys. Acta. 7:304–317 (1951); 2Ferjani et al. Plant Cell 23:2895-908. (2011); 3Bertoni G. Plant Cell 23, 2808 (2011); 4Ferjani et al. Sci. Rep. 8, 14696 (2018).

Why did you decide to become an Associate Editor?

The first invitation message that I received to join QPB as an Associate Editor went to my spam mailbox! Fortunately, it took only a few minutes to figure out that it was not a spam, because a great colleague and friend of mine, QPB Editor-in-chief Olivier Hamant, was copied. I decided to become an Associate Editor because I felt that, together with Olivier and all the team, we will probably buck the trend of classic editorial practice. With the rise of a new era of quantitative approaches, I felt that we are not there to merely evaluate manuscripts and make decisions, but to assist and guide authors who have asked quantitative questions, to get their work published in the best possible shape, and with the highest visibility to the plant science community.

How will Quantitative Plant Biology benefit your research field?

My path has been circuitous, and my research experience is relatively broad, as I have handled a plethora of biological material from spinach purchased in local markets, to model plant organisms. In that sense, QPB could benefit from my broad personal experience, and my commitment to keep on asking good questions.

Do you have any advice for authors submitting to Quantitative Plant Biology?

These past few decades have seen an explosion in the number of scientific papers, and new mega publishing houses. We are committed to high quality research articles on subjects that are sometimes overlooked, and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home, and much more. So, if you are asking quantitative questions to unfold the rich complexity of plants, do not hesitate to submit your article to QPB. We are here to assist you.


What excites you about Quantitative Plant Biology

In plant biology, we have made huge strides and gained an amalgam of knowledge, with its wider sense, unfortunately our approaches have been sometimes divergent. For decades, we have consciously admired the details, and somewhat neglected the whole process, and vice versa. With time, we ended up with a fragmentary or subdivided knowledge. Now, there is no need to inaugurate a new era of plant biology, because it is already there! Instead, there is a need to converge towards each other, share our common goals and thoughts, questions, hypotheses, discoveries, and integrate our “know-hows”, to make full use of the emerging new technologies, structuralize our knowledge to revolutionize the field.

In that sense, QPB is not merely a publishing journal, it is rather a way of thinking, and a straightforward SIGNAL that the plant science community should perceive, integrate, and transduce to the coming generations of plant biologists. Plants are our ultimate source of food, feed, fiber, and fuel. The need to feed the ever-increasing world population under the current global warming threats urges us to understand the rich diversity, as well as the complexity of plants to ensure food supply. Finally, it’s also exciting to be among the young editorial team, with its remarkably distinct tales of passion towards plant science, a clear-eyed wisdom in providing an interdisciplinary forum for high quality research on ground-breaking discoveries and predictions, and goals honed to an innovative cutting-edge future for all of us.

To submit your paper, go to: cambridge.org/qpb and click on ‘submit your article’

You can also find lots of useful information under the information tab, such as: Instructions for contributors

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *