Holger Puchta - Biography#

Holger Puchta is since 2002 full professor of molecular biology and the director of the Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter Institute for Plant Sciences at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. After his study of biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich on viroids he joined the laboratory of Barbara Hohn at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland as postdoc to work on DNA recombination in plants. In 1995 he became group leader at the Leibnitz Institute for Plant Genetics in Gatersleben (IPK), Germany. In 2000 he habilitated at the University Halle in Genetics. He was worldwide the first scientist to demonstrate that site-specific nucleases can be applied to induce different kinds of controlled changes in plant genomes. His group elucidated major pathways of DNA repair in Arabidopsis. He was also one of leading scientists adopting the CRISPR/Cas technology to plants. Recently his group was the first to establish CRISPR/Cas mediated plant chromosome engineering. He is since a row of years a “highly cited” researcher and was named “Pioneer of Plant Biotechnology” by the Plant Biotechnology Journal. He was awarded twice with a prestigious advanced grant of the European Research Council and most recently with the Reinhard Koselleck excellence funding of the German Research Foundation. Since the ruling of the European Court that gene-edited plants have to be treated as genome-modified organisms, he is strongly engaged in raising the public acceptance of the novel breeding technologies to enable their use in the EU. Part of these activities are interviews in newspapers, in the TV or in podcasts. Beside that he is giving lectures at various occasions to the general public and joins discussions with politicians, parliamentarians, ministers and legislators.