Joachim Wilhelm "Jo" Messing 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. 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. In the eighties, he provided incubator space for two Biotechnology centers at Rutgers, one in Medicine and one in Agriculture. Subsequently, he also founded two new departments at Rutgers and served as the first chair, the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and the Department of Genetics. Messing was also involved in the Plant Genome Initiative at Rutgers, which has contributed to the sequencing of the maize, sorghum, and the rice genome. Besides maize, sorghum, and rice, they have also contributed to the sequencing of the Brachypodium and Spirodela genomes. Messing died at his home in Somerset, New Jersey on September 13, 2019, three days after his 73rd birthday.
Research
Jo Messing was a pharmacist by training, but specialized in molecular biology during his PhD-research at the LM University of Munich and the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry. In the late seventies and early eighties, Jo Messing and his colleagues developed the shotgun DNA sequencing method with single and paired synthetic universal primers. The method is based on fragmenting DNA into small sizes, purifying them by cloning, and defining the start of sequencing with a short oligonucleotide. Because fragmentation produces overlapping fragments, sequences can be concatenated by overlapping sequence information, thereby reconstructing contiguous sequences, which was first exemplified by the complete structure of a plant DNA virus. His cloning vectors were also used to develop the method for oligonucleotide site-directed mutagenesis. DNA cloning, shotgun sequencing and site-directed mutagenesis became widely used to sequence large DNA molecules like human chromosomes and to engineer genes and proteins. These methods are freely available, have been the cornerstone of the biotechnology industry and are cited in many patents. At Rutgers, his plant genetics initiatives were directed towards the evolution of plant chromosomes and gene duplication. He also did research in non-Mendelian inheritance. Applied research in these genomic sequences permitted his laboratory to study the organization and evolution of the genes that control the supply of proteins for nutrition and as sources of biofuel. Projects with maize focused on upgrading the nutritional value of corn by genetically modifying corn to make methionine and lysine in the seeds, two essential amino acids that people and livestock need in their diet. Investigating the genetic properties of sorghum led to a natural sorghum variant with increased sugar in the stem allows the plant to be used for both biofuel and feed. Most recent initiatives investigating the properties of spirodela led to its discovery as an alternative bio-energy source.
