Prof. RNDr. Boris Vyskot, DrSc.

Boris Vyskot graduated in biology from the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, in 1974. As an undergraduated student he was awarded by the Academy of Sciences for his diploma thesis on haploid plants. He started as a PhD student at the Institute of Experimental Botany in Olomouc and continued at the Institute of Biophysics in Brno. Since 1975 he has been working at the Institute of Biophysics, first as a PhD student and later, when he finished his PhD (in 1978) as a research worker. Boris Vyskot together with Dr. Milan Bezděk started to study crown-gall tumours and later constructed first transgenic plants in our country. Efforts of Boris Vyskot were focused more on epigenetics and developmental biology. BV has been working on the model dioecious plants since 1992. Using immunostaining techniques he was able to demonstrate differences in DNA replication and chromatin modification between the two X chromosomes in female cells of Silene latifolia, which indicates a dosage compensation phenomenon. Similarly he demonstrated a large histoneH4-hypoacetylated heterochromatin of the two Y chromosomes in male nuclei of Rumex acetosa. His most original work is obviously epigenetic control of sex determination. Using DNA hypomethylating and histone hyperacetylating drugs he induced sex reversal in S. latifolia, i.e., male plants formed bisexual flowers. This trait was inherited with incomplete penetrance and varying expressivity. Holandric pattern of inheritance showed that the sex determining gene(s) are Y-linked. More recently, BV with his colleagues study evolutionary aspects of sex chromosomes. They found accumulation of retroelements and microsatellites on the Y chromosome and stated that different pairs of chromosomes evolved into the sex chromosomes in two closely related dioecious sections within the genus Silene. According to WoS data, Professor Vyskot published more than 130 papers in international scientific journals, which were 3,000times cited (h-index 37; citations per paper on average - 26), plus eight monographs and/or textbooks. His team has got a lot of foreign collaborations with joint papers (Prof. Dan Voytas – University of Minnesota, Prof. Gabriel Marais – University of Lyon, Prof. John Pannell – University of Lausanne, etc.). Since 1991 BV is a university teacher at the Masaryk University, he became the full professor in 2001. He presents full courses of Developmental Genetics, Epigenetics, and Gene Engineering at the Masaryk University, Mendel University, and Palacký University. In 1996-2002 he was a member of the Accreditation Committee responsible for university studies of biology and ecology. For this work he was awarded by the Medal of the Ministry of Education. In 2003 he was elected as the fellow of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic. Since 2013 he is a member of the Gremium of the Academy of Sciences for the scientific degree.