Draft:Carolyn Napoli

Carolyn Napoli is an Emerita Research Professor, University of Arizona. In 1990 she co-discovered the mechanism of co-suppression. , gene silencing which, like transposon silencing, was first discovered in plants.

Early Life and education

Napoli was born Carolyn Ann Cole in Harlingen, Texas in 1946. At the University of Florida she received a scholarship to pursue a Bachelors of Sciences degree in microbiology which she obtained with honors in 1972. While still an undergraduate, she secured a position in David H. Hubbell’s laboratory in the Soil Sciences Department.

Research and career

Continuing in the Hubbell lab, Napoli pursued her PhD research investigating the process of infection of Trifolium (clover) roots by the soil bacterium, Rhizobium trifolii. Using electron microscopy, she demonstrated, for the first time, the development of infection threads within root hairs.

Supported by an National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellowship, Napoli continued her Rhizobium research in the laboratory of Peter Albersheim at the University of Colorado Boulder later joining the lab of Larry Gold in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.

Transitioning from academia, Napoli accepted a position at the International Plant Research Institute (IPRI) in San Carlos, California, where she met Brian Staskawicz. When Staskawicz subsequently assumed a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, he offered Napoli a position in his new lab, working on plant avirulence genes

In Berkeley, Napoli met Richard A. Jorgensen, who was working at the Oakland-based agricultural biotechnology company Advanced Genetic Sciences, Inc. (AGS) which was acquired later by DNA Plant Technology Corporation. Together at AGS, they established a program to genetically engineer floriculture crops. With a goal of increasing flower pigmentation by overexpressing the gene encoding the Chalcone Synthase (CHS) they used a vector for high-level translation designed by their AGS colleague Jonathan Jones. The antisense CHS construct they deployed in Petunia plants created novel flower color distribution. One of these patterns, dubbed “Cossack Dancer,” was featured in The Plant Cell 30-year retrospective, "Refections on Plant Cell Classics,". These observations documented by Napoli and Jorgensen are examples of “co-suppression,” – a post transcriptional gene silencing mechanism predating the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi).

From DNAP, Napoli accepted a faculty position in the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of California, Davis (UCD). At UCD, Napoli deployed ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) strategy to produce mutations in both Petunia and Arabidopsis seeds. By screening over 1,200 mutants in she identified a certain bushy phenotype that she termed "decreased apical dominance" or "dad" mutants and subsequently published her analysis in the journal Plant Physiology of the reversal of this phenomenon by grafting. In a subsequent collaboration with Loverine Taylor, Napoli identified a phenotype that was used as a selectable marker for plant breeding research.

Following UCD, Napoli joined the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona (UA) where she focused on designing and distributing resources to the Arabidopsis and maize research communities under the auspices of an NSF Plant Genome Research Program grant led by Jorgensen and Vicki Chandler. At UA, Napoli launched the NSF-funded ChromDB (Chromatin Database), a platform for displaying chromatin-associated proteins, including RNAi-associated proteins, for a range of organisms. ChromDB provided high school teachers with hands-on bioinformatics and functional genomics experiences.

Awards and honors

In 2023 Napoli was recognized as a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists.