Margarete Suñé Mattevi (1941-2013) and the dynamics of chromosome changes

OBITUARY

Margarete Suñé Mattevi (1941-2013) and the dynamics of chromosome changes

Life History

Margarete Suñé Mattevi's life history is briefly summarized on Table 1. She was born on October 17, 1941 in Bagé, RS, in the family of well-known farmers, but in 1960 she moved to Porto Alegre to attend the Biological Sciences Course at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. At that time I was working in several aspects of human genetics, and she came to our laboratory, still as an undergraduate student, in 1962. I had advertised the need to replace a collaborator at the scientific initiation level, and in the moment that she started to use a pipette I was sure that I had profited with the change. It is like football, at the first contact with the ball you can immediately know if the player is or is not good!

Shortly after her graduation she was admitted to our Department, obtaining the Master's degree in 1970, and the Ph.D. degree in 1974. Along the years she developed a very fruitful academic career, that included the coordination of our Post-Graduate Program in 1986/89 and 1993/94. She was also very active in advisory committees or similar roles for CNPq, FAPERGS and FINEP. In 1992 she was elected for the Governing Board of the Brazilian Society of Genetics, a post held until 1994. In 1995 she formally retired from UFRGS, but remained in the institution, as an Invited Collaborator, until 2007.

In 2001 she was invited and accepted to work at the Brazilian Lutheran University (ULBRA), organizing there a new group of research, and working in this institution until her retirement, in 2011. Two years afterwards she was diagnosed as having a lung cancer and died of complications from it in December 26 of 2013.

Research

Human cytogenetics really started after the seminal development of the hypotonic technique devised by Tjio and Levan (1956). I went to Oxford, UK, in 1961 to learn how to use it, and Margarete was responsible for the full establishment of it in our laboratory. Her Master's degree was obtained investigating patients with gonadal dysgenesis (Mattevi et al., 1971), and the Ph.D. studying the cytogenetics of senescence changes (Mattevi and Salzano, 1975a,b). Her interest in human cytogenetics remained until 2004, but beginning in the 1980's she decided to turn to animal cytogenetics, working with cattle (example, Moraes et al., 1987) and especially rodents. She dedicated to these and other organisms studies that involved all her life, organizing a very successful team of research. In 2010 her laboratory at ULBRA had a stock of nothing less than 4,000 tissues and/or DNAs of small mammals including rodents, marsupials, bats, tayassuidae, primates and other taxa, from 150 places in the Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest, Araucaria Forests, and southern savannas. Highly selected examples of these studies are Nagamachi et al. (1997), Carvalho et al. (2002), and Bonvicino et al. (2009), but a full list of her articles are available at the Lattes Platform. They include 78 full research articles and five book chapters.

Family Life, Personality

Margarete was the fourth child in a sibship of five. Her sibs included Carmen, an engineer, Jaime, farmer, Jandira, entrepener, and Joáo Fausto, veterinarian. She was married to Joáo and had two daughters. The first, Vanessa, is a highly successful Genetics Adjunct Professor at Porto Alegre's Federal University of Health Sciences (UFCSPA). People say that she was exposed to genetics in utero, when Margarete, pregnant, came to work in our Department! The other daughter, Betina, is a medical doctor. Vanessa has a 4-year-old daughter, Heloísa, who was one of Margarete's delight at the end of her life.

Margarete had a wonderful personality was deeply involved with undergraduate and graduate students, laboratory, and administrative personnel. Her death created a lacuna difficult to be filled, and she will always be remembered by those who had the privilege of knowing her personally or through her papers.

Francisco M. Salzano

Departamento de Genética, IB, UFRGS,

Porto Alegre, RS

E-mail: [e-mail]

• Bonvicino CR, Gonçalves PR, Oliveira JA, Oliveira LFB and Mattevi MS (2009) Divergence in Zygodontomys (Rodentia, Sigmodontinae) and distribution of Amazonian savannas. J Hered 100:322-328.
• Carvalho BA, Oliveira LFB, Nunes AP and Mattevi MS (2002) Karyotypes of 12 marsupial species from Brazil. J Mammal 83:58-70.
• Mattevi MS, Wolff H, Salzano FM and Mallmann MC (1971) Cytogenetic, clinical, and genealogical analyses in a series of gonadal dysgenesis patients and their families. Hum Genet 13:126-143.
• Mattevi MS and Salzano FM (1975a) Senescence and human chromosome changes. Hum Genet 27:1-8.
• Mattevi MS and Salzano (19775b) Effect of sex, age and cultivation time on number of satellites and acrocentric associations in man. Hum Genet 29:265-270.
• Moraes JCF, Mattevi MS and Silva JF (1987) Fertility effects of a chromosome rearrangement (insertion 16) in Charolais cattle from Brazil. Theriogenology 27:665-678.
• Nagamachi CY, Pieczarka JC, Schwartz M, Barros RMS and Mattevi MS (1997) Comparative chromosomal study of five taxa of genus Callithrix, group Argentata (Callitrichidae, Primates) Cytogen Cell Genet 72:331-338.
• Tjio JH and Levan A (1956) The chromosome number of man. Hereditas 42:1-6.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  18 Sept 2014
• Date of issue
  June 2014