Jeffrey Bennetzen

Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia (UGA). Bennetzen is known for his work describing codon usage bias in yeast, and ''E. coli''; being the first to clone and sequence an active transposon in plants, discovering that most of the DNA in plant genomes was a particular class of mobile DNA (LTR-retrotransposons); solving the C-value paradox; proposing sorghum and Setaria as model grasses; showing that rice centromeres were hotspots for recombination, but not crossovers; and developing a technique to date polyploidization events. He is an author, with Sarah Hake of the book "Handbook of Maize." Bennetzen was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Provided by Wikipedia