Agriculture

Jonathan D. G. Jones

Affiliation at the time of the award:

The Sainsbury Laboratory, England

Award citation:

“For groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants”.

Prize share:

Jonathan Jones

Jeffery Dangl

Brian Staskawicz

Jonathan D. G. Jones (1954, England) is a plant molecular geneticist renowned for his pioneering contributions to understanding plant immunity and pathogen resistance mechanisms. Jones graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in Botany (1976) and a PhD (1980) from the Cambridge Genetics Department and the Plant Breeding Institute. Following postdoctoral research on symbiotic nitrogen fixation with Fred Ausubel at Harvard (1981–1982), he worked at AGS in Oakland, California, where he collaborated with Hugo Dooner on maize transposons in tobacco. Since 1988, he has been at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, serving twice as Head of the institute.  Jones is also a professor at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and an advisor to the Danforth Center and the 2Blades Foundation.

Plants are susceptible to various pathogens including fungi, bacteria and viruses. This can lead to significant yield losses and threaten the global food supply. For years, it was recognized that individuals within the same plant species exhibit varying disease resistance levels due to dominant alleles at resistance genes. The “gene-for-gene” hypothesis from the 1940s suggested plant disease resistance gene products interact with pathogen avirulence-gene products. However, the nature of, and functions encoded by, plant disease resistance genes remained unknown until the mid 1990s.

Much of our current knowledge of the plant immune system stems from the groundbreaking discoveries made by Jeffery Dangl, Jonathan Jones, and Brian Staskawicz. Staskawicz identified the first bacterial avirulence effector gene, providing crucial molecular evidence supporting the “gene-for-gene” theory. This discovery, alongside parallel work by Jones and Dangl, opened up the field of plant immunity. Staskawicz was also the first to show that bacterial avirulence proteins can have virulence functions inside the plant cell. Jones was the first to clone plant resistance genes that encode eukaryotic cell surface immune receptors, and all three identified multiple intracellular immune receptors. Jones and Dangl independently uncovered mechanisms by which immune receptors are activated through the indirect recognition of pathogen-effector proteins by extracellular and intracellular immune receptors, respectively. The discovery of pathogen effector proteins and plant immune receptors helped illuminate how these receptors are activated upon pathogen detection and helped reveal the downstream signaling pathways.

A landmark 2006 Nature review by Dangl and Jones provided the first detailed, and now textbook, model of the plant immune system. In a 2024 review in Cell, Jones, Dangl, and Staskawicz summarized fifty years of discoveries in plant immunity Their combined contributions significantly shaped our current understanding of the field, leading to targeted strategies to enhance resistance and to control a broad spectrum of plant diseases.

Jeffery L. Dangl

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Award citation:

“For groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants”.

Prize share:

Jeffery Dangl

Jonathan Jones

Brian Staskawicz

Jeffery L. Dangl (1957, USA) is the John N. Couch Distinguished Professor of Biology and an HHMI Investigator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A geneticist with a deep interest in the molecular mechanisms of the plant immune system. Dangl graduated from Stanford University with undergraduate degrees in English (Modern Literature) and Biological Sciences in 1981 and earned a doctorate in the Genetics Department of the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1986 for his studies of genetically engineered chimeric monoclonal antibodies in the laboratory of Prof. Leonard A. Herzenberg.

Plants are susceptible to various pathogens, including fungi, bacteria, and viruses. This can lead to significant yield losses and threaten the global food supply. For years, it was recognized that individuals within the same plant species exhibit varying disease resistance levels due to dominant alleles at resistance genes. The “gene-for-gene” hypothesis from the 1940s suggested plant disease resistance gene products interact with pathogen avirulence-gene products. However, the nature of, and functions encoded by, plant disease resistance genes remained unknown until the mid-1990s.

Much of our current knowledge of the plant immune system stems from the groundbreaking discoveries made by Jeffery Dangl, Jonathan Jones, and Brian Staskawicz. Staskawicz identified the first bacterial avirulence effector gene, providing crucial molecular evidence supporting the “gene-for-gene” theory. This discovery, alongside parallel work by Jones and Dangl, opened up the field of plant immunity. Staskawicz was also the first to show that bacterial avirulence proteins can have virulence functions inside the plant cell. Jones was the first to clone plant resistance genes that encode eukaryotic cell surface immune receptors, and all three identified multiple intracellular immune receptors. Jones and Dangl independently uncovered mechanisms by which immune receptors are activated through the indirect recognition of pathogen-effector proteins by extracellular and intracellular immune receptors, respectively. The discovery of pathogen effector proteins and plant immune receptors helped illuminate how these receptors are activated upon pathogen detection and helped reveal the downstream signaling pathways.

A landmark 2006 Nature review by Dangl and Jones provided the first detailed, and now textbook, model of the plant immune system. In a 2024 review in Cell, Jones, Dangl, and Staskawicz summarized fifty years of discoveries in plant immunity Their combined contributions significantly shaped our current understanding of the field, leading to targeted strategies to enhance resistance and to control a broad spectrum of plant diseases.

Brian J. Staskawicz

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Award citation:

“For groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants”.

Prize share:

Brian J. Staskawicz

Jeffery Dangl

Jonathan D. G. Jones

Brian J. Staskawicz (1952, USA) received his Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. He is the Maxine J. Elliot Professor of Plant & Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, and Director of Sustainable Agriculture at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). Staskawicz is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has been elected a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Staskawicz received a B.A. degree from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1974, a Master of Forest Science degree from Yale University in 1976, and a Ph.D. degree in plant pathology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980. After three years at the International Plant Research Institute, in San Carlos, California, he was appointed to the faculty of U.C. Berkeley, where he is now the Maxine J. Elliot Professor and chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology.

Plants are susceptible to various pathogens, including fungi, bacteria, and viruses. This can lead to significant yield losses and threaten the global food supply. For years, it was recognized that individuals within the same plant species exhibit varying disease resistance levels due to dominant alleles at resistance genes. The “gene-for-gene” hypothesis from the 1940s suggested plant disease resistance gene products interact with pathogen avirulence-gene products. However, the nature of, and functions encoded by, plant disease resistance genes remained unknown until the mid-1990s.

Much of our current knowledge of the plant immune system stems from the groundbreaking discoveries made by Jeffery Dangl, Jonathan Jones, and Brian Staskawicz. Staskawicz identified the first bacterial avirulence effector gene, providing crucial molecular evidence supporting the “gene-for-gene” theory. This discovery, alongside parallel work by Jones and Dangl, opened up the field of plant immunity. Staskawicz was also the first to show that bacterial avirulence proteins can have virulence functions inside the plant cell. Jones was the first to clone plant resistance genes that encode eukaryotic cell surface immune receptors, and all three identified multiple intracellular immune receptors. Jones and Dangl independently uncovered mechanisms by which immune receptors are activated through the indirect recognition of pathogen-effector proteins by extracellular and intracellular immune receptors, respectively. The discovery of pathogen effector proteins and plant immune receptors helped illuminate how these receptors are activated upon pathogen detection and helped reveal the downstream signaling pathways.

A landmark 2006 Nature review by Dangl and Jones provided the first detailed, and now textbook, model of the plant immune system. In a 2024 review in Cell, Jones, Dangl, and Staskawicz summarized fifty years of discoveries in plant immunity Their combined contributions significantly shaped our current understanding of the field, leading to targeted strategies to enhance resistance and to control a broad spectrum of plant diseases.

Martinus Th. “Rien” van Genuchten

Affiliation at the time of the award:

The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Award citation:

“for his groundbreaking work in understanding water flow and predicting contaminant transport in soils”.

Prize share:

None

Martinus Theodorus Van Genuchten, born in Vught, Netherlands, received his early education at the Agricultural U, Wageningen, and his Doctorate in the United States, at the New Mexico State University. Van Genuchten has had an exemplary and influential career, with numerous collaborations across the globe. He further served as co-editor and deputy editor, of nine journals and launched the Vadose Zone Journal, dedicated to the science of the near-surface environment.

The vadose zone is the undersaturated portion of the subsurface that lies above the groundwater table. The soil and rock in the vadose zone are not fully saturated with water; that is, the pores within them contain air as well as water. The movement of water within the vadose zone is important to agriculture, contaminant transport, and flood control. It is intensively used for the cultivation of plants, construction of buildings, and disposal of waste, and crucial in determining the amount and quality of groundwater that is available for human use.

During his 40-year career, Professor Van Genuchten transformed the broad fields of soil physics and vadose zone hydrology, which are central to modern agricultural operations and climate science. He created a much-needed scientific basis for understanding fluid flow and contaminant transport processes in unsaturated soils, including their interactions with the atmosphere above and groundwater below. Contemporary vadose zone hydrology is unthinkable without his many contributions, which established links between agriculture, soil science, geology, environmental sciences, and civil engineering. Particularly important were his studies on the basic processes governing water and chemical transport in soil systems, with his work on the nonequilibrium transport of agricultural chemicals remaining a landmark.
He pioneered the representation of dual-porosity and dual-permeability models considering mobile and immobile liquid regions in unsaturated porous media, derived novel analytical and numerical solutions, and performed some of the most definitive laboratory and field experiments to test the models. His models profoundly improved predictions of complex field phenomena and motivated an avalanche of studies along similar lines to address water and chemical transport in natural soils and rocks. Because of their attractive mathematical properties and their simplicity, the “van Genuchten equations” are now universally used in numerical simulators of subsurface flow and transport processes.
Prof. van Genuchten is awarded the Wolf Prize for reshaping the disciplines of soil physics and vadose zone hydrology. He not only published hundreds of scientific journal papers but wrote user manuals of his many computer programs now being used worldwide. He brought enormous visibility and credibility to the agricultural sciences profession. He facilitated the formation of productive links between theoreticians and practitioners, young students and accomplished scientists, and institutions in developed and less-developed countries. For all his numerous contributions to agriculture, soil science, and hydrology, Prof. Genuchten receives the 2023 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

Pamela Ronald

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of California, Davis, USA

Award citation:

“for pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice”.

Prize share:

None

Ronald, a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. She also serves as the director of grass genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California, and as the faculty director of the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy.

One of the greatest challenges of our time is to feed the growing population without further destroying the environment. Because most of the world’s farmland is already under cultivation and fresh water is scarce, increased food production must largely take place more efficiently. To produce a successful crop each year, farmers must employ strategies to combat pests, diseases, and environmental stresses, which reduce global yields by 30-60% each year.

Ronald’s lab studies genes that control resistance to disease and tolerance of environmental stress with the goal of improving food security for the world’s poorest farmers. Together with her collaborators, she has engineered rice for resistance to disease and tolerance to flooding, which seriously threatens rice crops in Asia and Africa.

Pamela Ronald has spent three decades studying rice, a staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Her discoveries show an advanced understanding of fundamental biological processes and enhance sustainable agriculture and food security. Ronald’s team isolated a gene that allows rice to survive two weeks of flooding and increases yield by 60% compared with conventional varieties. Her research facilitated the development of flood-tolerant rice varieties now grown by more than 6 million subsistence farmers in India and Bangladesh, where 4 million tons of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding.

Ronald’s isolation of the Xa21 immune receptor in 1995, the first member of this important class of receptors to be identified, revealed a new mechanism with which plants and animals detect and respond to infection. In 2015, her team isolated and characterized the receptor-ligand, a microbial immunogen, that triggers both developmental and immunological responses in the host. These breakthrough studies continue to have implications for studies of infectious diseases of both plants and animals.

Ronald is widely recognized for innovative and effective public engagement with the goal of advancing agricultural sustainability. Ronald’s lectures and writings, and in particular her book with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, established a new paradigm where biotechnologies and organic agriculture are integrated as a base for sustainable farming, and as a way of coexistence for environmentalists and technologists.

Caroline Dean

Affiliation at the time of the award:

John Innes Centre, England, UK

Award citation:

“for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.”

Prize share:

None

As winter gives way to spring, as if by clockwork, many plants bloom in all their glory in order to attract pollinators. These species delay their flowering until the onset of spring, when there are optimal conditions  for fertilization. It has been long known that plants delay flowering until they have experienced a period of prolonged cold, a process termed vernalization. Prof. Dean’s work on understanding the plant’s memory mechanisms and temperature sensing, has many implications for agriculture and extending crop range to ensure year-round supply.

Professor Dean (Born 1957) grew up in the north of England. After gaining both a BA and a PhD in Biology at the University of York, Caroline moved to California to research molecular biology. She began working at the John Innes Centre in 1988, where she works on the molecular basis of vernalization.

Dean’s research has provided several major breakthroughs that have direct impact on our understanding of a fundamental process in biology that is of critical importance to society, namely the molecular mechanism controlling the timing of flowering in higher plants. Her research was focused around two central questions in plant biology: Why do certain plants have to pass through winter before they bloom, and how do they remember that they have been exposed to cold temperatures weeks or months earlier? These are not merely academic problems, because the breeding of different varieties of cereals that either have or do not have this winter requirement has been a major cornerstone for increasing the yield of agricultural crops in temperate climates. Dean and her students cloned several of the most important genes controlling Arabidopsis flowering time in response to vernalization, the process by which plants recall temperature to regulate flowering in the correct season.

In attempts to understand the mechanisms by which the vernalization pathway operates, Dean and coworkers have discovered an epigenetic mechanism that regulates the pathway, linking RNA processing with small RNA silencing pathways and histone demethylation. Together with collaborators they then developed a quantitative molecular model explaining how plants “remember” winter. Her seminal research describes the mode by which plants extract signals from noisy temperature profiles, and how this is remembered through subsequent development. Dean has translated her basic research from Arabidopsis thaliana into crop biology as well, especially by breeding of various Brassicas that have flowering time alleles chosen by molecular methods based on her basic research. Dean’s work provides a molecular paradigm for environmentally-controlled epigenetic regulation with enormous ramifications for breeding crops in stressful and changing environments.

Caroline has been a strong advocate for women in science, and enthusiastic role model and mentor. Dean’s work and its implications for agriculture have gained increasing currency in the face of a changing climate, which have been of profound importance not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole.

David Zilberman

Affiliation at the time of the award:

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Award citation:

“for developing economic models to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions”.

Prize Share:

None

David Zilberman has been a professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department in Berkeley since 1979 where he holds the Robinson Chair. He is the cofounder and co-director of the BEAHRS Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) and is the director of the Master of Development Practice (MDP). David writes both for professional journals and the general public and aims to integrate economic theory to real world problems in both developed and under developing countries. He is also an extension specialist, and co-editor of ARE Update. David is a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He has published in various fields on the Economics of agriculture, environment, technology and risk. David completed his B.A. in Economics and Statistics from Tel Aviv University in Israel and his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley.

Dr. Zilberman has incorporated biophysical features of agroeconomic systems to develop economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions in several important areas:

Water: He developed models of choice and impact of water conservation technologies, showing that they are yield-enhancing and usually water-saving, though when yield effects are especially high, they may lead to increased water use per unit of land. Introduction of water trading can facilitate adoption of conservation practices.

Pest Control: Zilberman revolutionized research on the economics of pest control by

(a) Introducing the damage control function to estimate the productivity of pest control strategies.

(b) Developing methods to assess the benefits of pesticide under regulation.

(c) Introducing a method to regulate environmental health risks of chemical pesticides.

Biotechnology: His studies challenge myths about genetically modified (GM) crops. He showed that the introduction of GM cotton has increased yields substantially in India and that GMOs have increased supplies of corn and soybean, reducing prices and benefitting the poor. His work provides a framework to assess the cost of delay in introducing new technologies due to prolonged regulatory processes. He estimated the social cost of regulation for golden rice and banning the introduction of biotechnologies to Africa.

Payment for Ecosystem Services: Zilberman developed better mechanisms to allocate government payment for agricultural services, and motivated the redesign of programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the US.

Technology Adoption: Zilberman’s work developed a sophisticated approach to analyze adoption of modern technologies in agriculture incorporating farmer behavior, heterogeneity, and dynamic processes of learning. This approach has been applied heavily.

Dr. Zilberman’s career presents a unique mixture of theoretical work, applied research and extension, and he is a leading protagonist in debates over water policy, environmental and resource policy in agriculture and the bioeconomy.