Joachim messing biography

Joachim Messing

German-American biologist (1946–2019)

Joachim Messing

Born

Joachim Wilhelm Messing


(1946-09-10)September 10, 1946

Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

DiedSeptember 13, 2019(2019-09-13) (aged 73)

Somerset, New Jersey, U.S.

Alma materHeinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Free University of Berlin, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Scientific career
FieldsBiology
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Davis, University of Minnesota, Rutgers University

Joachim Wilhelm "Jo" Messing (September 10, 1946 – September 13, 2019) was a German-American biologist who was a professor of molecular biology and the fourth director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University.[1]

Upon his arrival at Rutgers in 1985, Jo Messing initiated research activity on computational and structural biology and further emphasis on molecular genetics of the regulation of gene expression and biomolecular interactions.[2] In the eighties, he provided incubator space for two Biotechnology

Joachim Messing, Developer of Shotgun Sequencing, Dies

In addition to his work on widely-used techniques, the researcher was known for engineering crop plants.

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Joachim Messing, the longtime director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, died on September 13 at the age of 73. He was perhaps best known for developing a widely used DNA analysis technique known as shotgun sequencing, in which the nucleic acid is broken into chunks that can be analyzed simultaneously.

“Jo’s approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widely”—that is, he did not patent them, Robert Goodman, the executive dean of agriculture and natural resources at Rutgers

Research Overview

The Messing lab would like to contribute to the understanding of the expression of regulation of gene copies in plants. It is now apparent that many gene products are derived from multiple gene copies. As use of copies rapidly increases, their sequences are quite conserved or so similar that it becomes difficult to infer gene products from which the genes they produce. Therefore, it becomes necessary to sequence the genome of an organism so that one can sort gene copies in their location on chromosomes. Then one can match each RNA species quantitatively with individual gene copies.

Contact Information

Waksman Institute
190 Frelinghuysen Road
Messing Lab
Piscataway, NJ08854
United States

Selected Publications

Complete list of publications: [Pubmed]

Gene expression and evolution of seed proteins

An important aspect of gene expression is DNA modification and chromatin structure. Maize seems to be in particular suited for this purpose because the portion of the genome representing active genes is rather small. The maize genome has an even highe

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