Said Amin Ghabrial

Said Amin Ghabrial was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1939. He received his B.S. degree in 1959 from Cairo University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. degree from Louisiana State University in 1965. Dr. Ghabrial did postdoctoral research at the University of California-Davis before returning to Cairo to serve as a plant virologist in the Ministry of Agriculture. He returned to the United States in 1970 to do postdoctoral research at Purdue University. Dr. Ghabrial joined the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Kentucky in 1972 and rose to the rank of professor in 1986. Dr. Ghabrial has made significant contributions in several areas of plant pathology. The most noteworthy of these has dealt with virusmediated attenuation of virulence in phytopathogenic fungi. His discovery of virus-like particles in aberrant cultures of Helminthosporium victoriae and the subsequent molecular characterization of two isometric viruses from the fungus resulted in the first report on the molecular characterization of a totivirus infecting a filamentous plant-pathogenic fungus. Dr. Ghabrial showed that there are two forms of this virus that differ in their capsid protein and transcriptional activity and that they may represent different stages in the life cycle of the virus. Recent work has revealed factors involved in the modulation of virus and fungal pathogenesis. One of these is a protein kinase/ RNA-binding protein that is overexpressed in virus-infected fungal cells; activation of this protein appears to be responsible for triggering the induction of the disease in fungi. Dr. Ghabrial has served as an associate and senior editor of Phytopathology.