Joseph Ecker, a Moore Foundation grantee at the Salk Institute, has developed a new method to rapidly map regions of DNA targeted by regulatory proteins.
Revealing this landscape of protein-binding zones on DNA, called the "cistrome," shows how plants control where and when genes are expressed, and could give scientists insight into what makes certain plants drought tolerant or disease resistant.
"This is one of the first efforts to globally characterize all the regulatory elements in a plant genome," says Ecker, who is a HHMI/Moore Foundation Plant Biology Investigator. "The cistrome has been a missing piece of information for trying to understand how plants function."
Ecker is an internationally recognized plant biologist known for his pioneering contributions to plant genomics. He advocated for the mapping and sequencing of the genome of the tiny mustard weedArabidopsis thaliana, commonly known as thale cress -- widely considered one of the most important model organisms for the study of plant genetics and genomes.
Ecker was recognized by TIME magazine in 2009 for his pioneering role in epigenetics, which suggests the behavior of genes can be modified by environmental influences and these changes can be passed down through generations.
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Image courtesy of the Salk Institute.
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