Profile of Joseph R. Ecker

Abstract

Ecker, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and a member of the PNAS Editorial Board, has spent much of the last 25 years dissecting the genetics and identifying key signaling components of the ethylene pathway in plants. He was an early advocate of and participant in sequencing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, which gained a foothold as the plant world's model organism only in the late 1980s. He has also developed many genomic tools and resources for Arabidopsis researchers, such as chips to identify all the transcripts in the genome and a collection of Arabidopsis plants carrying mutations for almost every gene, which have revolutionized plant biology. In his Inaugural Article in a recent issue of PNAS (1), Ecker and his colleagues describe the role of a member of the ethylene pathway.