Wolf B. Frommer

Biosketch

Wolf B Frommer, Dr. rer. nat, is Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Heinrich Heine University and Visiting Professor at ITbM, Nagoya University. He earned his Diploma in Biology and Doctorate from Cologne University, Germany. He was a postdoctoral fellow and independent group leader at the Institute for Genebiological Research, Berlin. He became Chair of Plant Physiology at Tübingen University in 1996, and was Founding Director of the ZMBP. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Science in Stanford, where he served as Director of Plant Biology and was appointed full professor at Stanford University. He also served as Vice President of JBEI in Emeryville. He is a fellow of AAAS, and member of NAS and the German Academy of Sciences. He is recipient of various awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz prize, Körber Prize for European Science, Laurence Bogorad Award, Tsungming Tu award, and the Alexander Humboldt professorship.

Research Interests

Dr. Frommer’s research on membrane transport in plants seeks to understand the mechanisms of intercellular, interorgan and interorganismal transport/translocation and exchange of nutrients. These studies involve identification and characterization of transport proteins and plasmodesmata. The lab identified many of the key transporters for sucrose, amino acids, ammonium etc., and characterized the physiological roles. Inadvertently, the lab discovered a role of nutrients in disease susceptibility, and the new insights are used to develop crop plants that are resistant to pathogens, with an emphasis on finding solutions for small scale food producers. The lab pioneered the development of genetically encoded metabolite sensors and uses them to explore nutrient transport and signaling processes. A new frontier is the characterization of plant-specific cell-cell bridges, the plasmodesmata.