Roger N. Beachy is an American biologist, born in 1944 in Plain City, Ohio, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, who has also directed the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Working with Monsanto at Washington University in St. Louis, he showed that expressing a virus's own coat protein gene inside a transgenic plant could make the plant resistant to that virus, producing the first genetically engineered virus-resistant food crop, a tomato, and this coat protein-mediated resistance strategy was later applied to potato, pepper, papaya, squash and other crops.
Facts
Defining ContributionEstablished pathogen-derived resistance, showing that expressing a plant virus coat protein gene in transgenic plants confers resistance to that virus; his work with Monsanto produced the world’s first genetically modified food crop, a virus-resistant tomato. 1 In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Roger N. Beachy (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationBirth, family and education section
Roger N. Beachy was born in 1944 in Plain City, Ohio.
opening sentence
Roger N. Beachy is an American biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who studies plant virology.
Research section
His research at Washington University in St. Louis, in collaboration with Monsanto Company, led to the development of the world’s first genetically modified food crop, a variety of tomato that was modified for resistance to virus disease.
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