Dave Jackson

Dave Jackson is a Professor of Plant Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA. He obtained his PhD in 1991 from the John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK, where he worked with Professors Cathie Martin and Keith Roberts. From 1992-1997, he was a NATO and USDA Postdoctoral Fellow at the USDA/UC Berkeley Plant Gene Expression Center, USA, with Professor Sarah Hake. His lab studies genes and signaling pathways that control plant growth and architecture. They were the first to discover that transcription factors can traffic between plant cells through specialized channels called plasmodesmata, and that developmental mRNAs can also traffic between cells and are important for stem cell function. They have also discovered genes that control stem cell proliferation, including novel CLAVATA-type receptors, and heterotrimeric G proteins that interact with these receptors that are in a fundamentally different class compared to animal G protein coupled receptors. Their work has also used genome editing to make weak mutations in developmental genes that can enhance seed production in maize, leading to potential crop yield increases. The Jackson lab also develops maize genomics tools and is characterizing gene expression networks using single cell sequencing, revealing new hypotheses in control of inflorescence development. In 2015, Jackson was appointed as a Chang Jiang Visiting Professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China, and he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019.