Tribute to Shirley Jeffrey: 50 years of research on chlorophyll c

Shirley Winifred Jeffrey was born in 1930 in Townsville, Australia. She was the second of a family of four children, and the only one who ended up in science. Her father was a senior executive in an oil company, and this meant having to move from city to city. From the Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne, where her interest in biology first emerged, she moved to the University of Sydney for undergraduate studies. Here she completed a BSc degree (1952), majoring in microbiology and biochemistry, and continued with a MS degree in Biochemistry (1954), working on the metabolism of oyster sperm under the supervision of Dr George Humphrey. She obtained a PhD (1958) in Biochemical Pharmacology from the King’s College Hospital Medical School of London University, working on problems associated with using aspirin for treating diabetes (Smith & Jeffrey 1956). Upon return to Australia, she rejoined Dr Humphrey who by then had been appointed chief of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Division of Fisheries & Oceanography at Cronulla, Sydney. For several years, marine scientists had suggested that some marine algae contained not only the well-known chlorophylls a and b but also a third, chlorophyll c. In 1958 Dr Humphrey advertised for a Research Scientist to solve the mystery, Shirley was the best of 12 applicants, and the rest is history! She concentrated on chromatographic pigment separation techniques, starting with paper (Jeffrey 1961), column (Jeffrey 1962) and thin-layer chromatography (Jeffrey 1968a, 1974, 1981), and ultimately in the 1990s with Dr Simon Wright pursuing high performance liquid chromatography (Wright et al. 1991). Shirley also drew attention to the occurrence of chlorophyll b at the chlorophyll maximum in the North Pacific Central Gyre, first identified with thin-layer chromatography (Jeffrey 1976a), and later confirmed with high performance liquid chromatography. The results from her first attempt of purification of chlorophyll c from the brown seaweed Sargassum appeared now 50 years ago as a note in Nature (Jeffrey 1962). Chlorophyll c is sometimes referred to as chlorophyllide c because the lack of a phytol chain, but it has the same lightharvesting function as chlorophylls a and b, which is why the trivial name has now become well established in the literature. From 1962 to 1964 she worked as a research fellow in the marine photosynthesis lab of Dr Mary Bell Allen in Berkeley, characterizing for the first time the pigments of the haptophyte Emiliania huxleyi (Lohmann) Hay & Mohler (Jeffrey & Allen 1964). She revisited the pigments of this species numerous times in her career (Jeffrey & Wright 1987; Zapata et al. 2004). Using a new polyethylene powder brought back from Berkeley, she described two new chlorophyll c fractions, designated c1 and c2 (Jeffrey 1968a, b, 1972, 1976b). Later work with Australian and Spanish collaborators ultimately revealed a suite of at least nine chlorophyll c fractions, particularly in the Haptophyta. These included chlorophyll c3 (Fooks & Jeffrey 1989) and the non-polar chlorophyll c2 monogalactosyldiacyl glyceride ester with a massive lipid side chain (Garrido et al. 2000). A chance invitation in 1966 to join the maiden voyage of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography vessel Alpha Helix to the Great Barrier Reef brought her into contact with Professors Francis Haxo (Scripps), Kazuo Shibata (University of Tokyo) and Per Halldal (University of Oslo), working on pigments of the then phylogenetically unknown zooxanthellae from corals and clams. Their pigments appeared to be identical to those of cultured plankton dinoflagellates that contained the carotenoid peridinin in addition to chlorophylls a, c, diadinoxanthin and several minor carotenoids. Peridinin was isolated in bulk, crystallized and its extinction coefficients in various solvents established (Jeffrey & Haxo 1968). A spectrophotometric study with Shibata on chlorophyll c from giant clam Tridacna zooxanthellae produced an important baseline for future studies (Jeffrey & Shibata 1969). This Coral Sea cruise led to an invitation in 1973 for a sabbatical in Prof. Andrew Benson’s lab at Scripps in California where she worked on violaxanthin carotenoid transformations in Dr Shirley Jeffrey, c. 1990. Phycologia (2012) Volume 51 (2), 123–125 Published 12 March 2012