David Jackson

Dave Jackson is a Professor of Plant Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA. He obtained his PhD at the John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK, working with Cathie Martin and Keith Roberts, and did a post doc with Sarah Hake at the Plant Gene Expression Center, Berkeley, CA, before joining CSHL in 1997, where his lab studies genes and signals that regulate plant growth and architecture. His lab has discovered regulators of stem cell proliferation in plants, including a heterotrimeric G protein subunit that interacts with a completely different class of receptors than in animals, and helps to explain how signaling from diverse receptors is achieved in plants. His work has also demonstrated that weak mutations in developmental genes can enhance seed production in maize, leading to potential crop yield increases. The lab is also developing maize genomics tools and characterizing gene expression networks that have revealed new hypotheses in control of inflorescence development.