Luca Comai

Comai first applied for a teaching position at the University of California, Riverside in January 1981.[5] But when this position wasn't offered to him, he instead joined the biotech company Calgene in the latter half of 1981 during its initial opening period.[6] While he had been attempting to get support among the Riverside faculty for his application, he had been informed of the properties of glyphosate and its specific targeting of the EPSP synthase enzyme. He proposed to Calgene's science board that they try to develop a plant gene mutation that changed the shape of EPSP synthase so that glyphosate would be unable to bind to it. His suggestion was rejected due to glyphosate being a product produced by another company, but he decided to work on the gene mutation on his own time.[5] Using Salmonella, he used random mutagenesis and subsequent application of glyphosate to try and stumble across the EPSP synthase mutation he was seeking and he succeeded.[7]

In 1982, Comai presented his glyphosate tolerance mutation to a fellow scientist, Steve Rogers, who worked at Monsanto and demonstrated that he had made a superior form of the resistance gene than the one Monsanto had been working on. Though it was still not good enough for agricultural production and Comai continued his independent work. He published a paper in the journal Nature in October 1985 describing how he and his colleagues at Calgene had created glyphosate-resistant plants using the gene mutation Comai had found years earlier.[5] This outcompeting of Monsanto's flagship product created a strong sense of rivalry with Calgene and subsequent layoffs at Monsanto at the end of 1985.[5]

First becoming a professor at the University of Washington in 1990, Comai's lab focused on the development of improved agricultural genetic traits by using the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana to co-develop what was referred to as the TILLING protocol.[8] This system included developing gene models and inbred lines, including an expanded EcoTILLING protocol developed in 2004, to compare differences in these plant lines to the reference genome and isolate new mutations and traits for further research.[9] He would later lead the TILLING Core Service Facility at UC Davis that continued developing a genetic analysis platform called "TILLING-by-Sequencing" that would be used on not just Arabidopsis, but was expanded to also include Camelina, tomato, rice, and wheat.[10] An award sponsorship of $489,000 was given to Comai's lab in 2014 from a joint donation of three companies in order to sponsor the further use of TILLING in current tomato cultivar populations.[11]

Comai joined UC Davis in 2006 with his lab's research focusing on glyphosate resistance, functional genomics, and epigenetics, along with general mutational trait research. He is also well known for his work as a teacher of the "BIS 101" undergraduate genetics course and his use of whiteboard writing and his co-produced video series alongside the university.[3] A collaboration between Comai's lab and Kyoto University in 2014 on the genetic sex reproduction of the persimmon species Diospyros lotus found through investigating the genomes of several dozen male and female plants the specific genes involved in their sex determination. As these persimmons are among the few plants exhibiting dioecy, this discovery opened up agricultural opportunities for trait improvement and the research received significant media interest.[12][13]