Joachim Messing

Joachim Wilhelm Messing (1946 to 2019) was a German-American molecular biologist and the fourth director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he and his colleagues developed shotgun DNA sequencing using single and paired synthetic universal primers, a method of fragmenting DNA into small overlapping pieces, sequencing each and reassembling the overlaps into a continuous sequence, and his cloning vectors also enabled site-directed mutagenesis; these methods became foundational to the biotechnology industry and to large-scale sequencing projects including the human genome.