Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia. Bennetzen is known for his work describing codon usage bias in yeast, being the first to clone and sequence an active transposon in maize, and developing and proposing along with Michael Freeling the model of the grasses as a single genetic system. He is one of two authors, with Sarah Hake of the book "Handbook of Maize." Bennetzen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
In 1983, Bennetzen became an Assistant Professor at Purdue University, becoming a full Professor in 1991 and H. Edwin Umbarger Distinguished Professor of Genetics in 1999. After two decades at Purdue, he joined the faculty at UGA in 2003 as a Professor of Genetics, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and Giles Chair in Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics. He was interim Head of the Department of Genetics at UGA from 2009–2011. He is also an adjunct member of UGA's interdisciplinary Institute of Bioinformatics and Department of Plant Biology. He founded the Maize Genetics Executive Committee and the McClintock Prize. From 2012–2016, he was a 1000 Talents Professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the Kunming Institute of Botany. In 2016, he established labs at Anhui Agricultural University and the Yunnan Academy of Forestry to study the molecular genetics of tea and two Chinese native oil trees, Camellia oleifera and Malania oleifera.
Research Focuses
Bennetzen's research interests include plant genome structure/evolution and gene function relationships, transposable element biology, genetic diversity in under-utilized crops of the developing world, rapid evolution of complex disease resistance loci in plants, fine structure recombinational analysis, the coevolution of plant/microbe and plant/parasite interactions, and the genetic basis of quality traits in tea and other important crops. His lab was the first to clone an active TE from plants ; to show that classic disease resistance genes in plants are both recombinationally unstable and cell autonomous ; to use DNA probes from one grass genome to map another, demonstrating genetic collinearity ; to show that DNA TEs preferentially insert into hypomethylated DNAs in or near genes ; to demonstrate that the majority of plant genomes is composed ofLTR retrotransposons ; to show the microcolinearity of plant genomes, and the nature/rate/origin of exceptions to microcolinearity ; to explain the timing and mode of both plant genome expansion and contraction ; to show that plant centromeres are hot spots for recombination but not crossing over ; to show apparent site-directed recombination in plants ; to use centromere gain/loss to determine the origin of plant chromosomes ; to demonstrate that errors in mismatch base repair may be the most common origin of DNA double strand breaks in plants ; and to demonstrate domestication-associated changes in root and rhizosphere microbiomes.
