Jonathan Jones

Jonathan D G Jones is a plant molecular geneticist who has made distinctive contributions to understanding how plants resist disease, and to how pathogens circumvent host immune mechanisms. He was born in London UK in 1954, where he grew up. He graduated from Cambridge University, UK, with a degree in Botany (1976), and a PhD jointly between Cambridge Genetics Department and the Plant Breeding Institute in Trumpington (1980). After postdoctoral work with Fred Ausubel at Harvard on symbiotic nitrogen fixation (1981-2), he worked at start-up agbiotech company AGS in Oakland, CA, working closely with Hugo Dooner to study the behaviour of maize transposons in tobacco. Since 1988, JJ has worked at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich UK, serving as Head of Laboratory 1994-7 and 2003-2009. He was elected member of EMBO in 1998, Fellow of Royal Society in 2003, and is International Member of US NAS. In 2012 he was awarded the U Minnesota Stakman prize. He is a Professor at the University of East Anglia. He has served as advisor to the Danforth Centre in St Louis, and is an advisor to the 2Blades Foundation. In the early 90s, the Jones group used genetics to discover the first transmembrane cell surface receptors involved in immunity in plants, and discovered that the leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domain of such receptors is involved in pathogen recognition. He was first to propose the guard hypothesis for indirect recognition of pathogen molecules by plant immune receptors. Jones uses the GM method to develop potato lines that are completely resistant to late blight, potato viruses and bacterial wilt, and co-founded www.norfolkplantsciences.com in 2007 to bring flavonoid-enriched tomatoes to market; these GM purple tomatoes have received USDA and FDA approval and are being commercialized in the US by https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/.