At the invitation of Professor Xu Jianhong from Institute of Crop Science, Professor Joachim Messing from Rutgers University, the Director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, visited Zhejiang University from October 10-12. Prof. Messing gave the lecture titled “Concept and Implementation of Whole-Genome Sequencing”. He told us the story of the development of shotgun DNA sequencing and its application in plant genome. Prof. Messing developed M13mp/pUC/JM cloning kits and helped to create the field of plant genomics. He published nearly 300 papers in journals including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Communications, Plant Cell, PNAS, Genome Research, and one of his papers was cited more than 14,000 times.
For his remarkable achievement, Prof. Messing and his colleagues received the World Technology Award in Biotechnology and the USDA Secretary’s Honor Award. He was the winner of the 2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, probably the highest international academic reward in this category, and of the 2014 Promega Biotechnology Award of the American Society of Microbiology. Messing, a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement in Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the oldest continuously existing science academy in the world.
Deputy dean Prof. Zhu Shuijin hosted the lecture, and vice president Prof. Ying Yibin and dean of CAB Prof. Chen Xuexin met with Prof. Messing after the lecture. Before the lecture, Prof. Messing made academic communication with teachers and students from Institute of Crop Science.
