Barbara Demmig-Adams

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Barbara Demmig-Adams (born October 7, 1955 in Düsseldorf ) is a German biologist and professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder .

Career

Demming-Adams studied biology and chemistry at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg , where he did his doctorate in plant physiology in 1984 . From 1984 to 1986 she worked as a postdoc at the Plant Biology Institute of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, USA. She then moved back to the University of Würzburg and completed her habilitation there in 1986. Since 1989 she has been working at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the department “Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”. In 1990 she became an assistant professor, in 1994 an associate professor and since 1998 she has been a professor for the department. In 2013 she was appointed "Professor of Distinction".

research

Demmig-Adams is researching the mechanisms that plants use to protect themselves from too much sunlight (photoprotection). Through her research on balsam poplar , common ivy and the delicious window leaf, she was able to show that the yellow-orange pigment zeaxanthin plays an important role in converting light into heat in plants. The xanthophyll cycle ensures that the plants are not damaged by high radiation intensity. In addition, she deals with the molecular mechanisms of plant photoprotection and photoinhibition . Photoinhibition is understood as the inhibition of photosynthesis through high illuminance levels well above the light saturation point .

Demmig-Adams discovered that the mechanisms of photoprotection in plants are similar to the mechanisms that protect the human eye from damage caused by excessive exposure to light. The yellow-orange zeaxanthin is responsible for this in plants and the yellow-orange lutein in the “yellow spot” on the retina ( macula lutea ) in the human eye .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Barbara Demmig, Klaus Winter, Almuth Krüger, Franz-Christian Czygan: Photoinhibition and Zeaxanthin Formation in Intact Leaves. In: Plant Physiology. 84, 1987, p. 218, doi : 10.1104 / pp.84.2.218 .
  2. Member entry by Barbara Demmig-Adams (with picture and curriculum vitae) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on March 7, 2020.
  3. Demmig-Adams, Barbara. In: The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Retrieved March 7, 2020 (American English).