František Sehnal: A project that worked out

Elsevier

Available online 6 January 2023, 104475

Journal of Insect PhysiologyAuthor links open overlay panelAbstract

František Sehnal was a prominent and inspiring figure in many areas of insect science, most notably endocrinology, developmental biology, silk research, and recently insect interactions with genetically modified crops. In this article, I will briefly overview Sehnal's research and other academic and educational activities. I would also like to share my personal experience with František Sehnal as a mentor who drafted, in 1990, a plan for my doctoral thesis: to identify a receptor for juvenile hormone. The project ended up taking more than two decades to complete. While František has passed away, his legacy stays.

Section snippetsWho was František Sehnal to me

To his acquaintances around the world, František Sehnal was known as Franta. “How is Franta doing?” and “Say hello to Franta” was to be heard at every insect conference. Until November 2021, when he sadly passed away. František Sehnal was my mentor. He supervised my undergraduate and doctoral studies, which concluded in 1993. It would be difficult for me to comment on his work and contribution to science without describing my personal experience. While necessarily subjective, I hope that my

The man of perseverance and vision

The answer to how Sehnal, trapped in the communist Czechoslovakia, could publish with the world leaders is two-fold. First, it was his deep knowledge of the subject and genuine passion for science. Second, it was his communication skill. Sehnal had a remarkable ability to maintain friendly relationships, established during a short window of opportunity in the mid-1960's when the country experienced an episode of relative freedom. In 1966, Sehnal commenced his postdoc stay at Case Western

Chasing too many rabbits?

A Web of Science search yielded 200 journal papers authored by Sehnal since 1966. He also wrote or co-authored some 15 books and book chapters, of which the impressive Growth and Life Cycles (Sehnal, 1985) was already mentioned. My favorite is the comprehensive chapter Evolution of Insect Metamorphosis (Sehnal et al., 1996) which, in my opinion, captures the essence of postembryonic insect development and surpasses other contemporary texts on metamorphosis. Sehnal and his colleagues uniquely

A project finished 20 years late

In setting research goals including student assignments, František Sehnal was incurably optimistic. My Ph.D. project was not supposed to end by cloning the two ecdysone-induced Galleria genes mentioned above. It originally aimed to “unveil the mechanism of juvenile hormone action through identifying the JH receptor gene and characterizing its protein product including ligand-binding assays with JH and synthetic juvenoids”. Sehnal mailed the two-page project assignment to me in 1990 while he

Uncited reference

Jindra et al. (1994b).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

I remain grateful to František Sehnal for his mentorship and for introducing me to international science. In this respect, I would like to thank Lynn Riddiford for agreeing to František's proposal to accept me in her lab. The JHR work would not have been successful without the hospitality and excellent collaboration of Jean-Philippe Charles. Finally, I thank all of my collaborators and students who graduated from my lab since 1999.

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