Gustavo Caetano-Anolles

Who is Gustavo Caetano-Anolles?

Gustavo Caetano-Anollés is Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an expert in the field of evolutionary and comparative genomics.

He obtained his doctorate in biochemistry at the National University of La Plata in Argentina in 1986. During his early career at Ohio State University and the University of Tennessee he studied the symbiosis between nitrogen-fixing root nodule-forming bacteria and legumes from different angles, exploring the role of bacterial attachment and chemotaxis and plant systemic signals that control nodule number. While in Tennessee he co-invented the technique of DNA amplification with arbitrary primers [see DNA amplification fingerprinting and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA ]. This technique generates fingerprints of nucleic acids and molecular markers useful for genome mapping and molecular ecology and evolution. He also developed widely used methods for the silver staining of DNA that are commercially available. He holds several US patents in molecular biology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biology at the University of Oslo in 1998 and directed the laboratory of molecular ecology and evolution.