Joseph R. Ecker

Almost singlehandedly made Arabidopsis the pre-eminent model for plant functional genomics studies. An early advocate for sequencing the Arabidopsis genome, he directed much of the sequencing. In a single, elegant experiment, he and his collaborators defined most of the transcripts in Arabidopsis by designing a set of GeneChips to span the genome. They determined the Arabidopsis methylome and used these techniques and analytical tools to define the human ES cell methylome. By producing a collection of sequence-indexed insertion mutants, he revolutionized plant biology. It is now possible to request a mutant for each Arabidopsis gene by email.