Image: Dawe began his postdoctoral work at a lab in Berkeley that used 3D light microscopy to study maize chromosomes. He followed in the footsteps of Barbara McClintock, winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who had discovered transposons, which are sequences of nucleic acid in DNA that can change their position in the genome. Dawe wanted to develop new methods to visualize maize chromosomes at higher resolution. Corn was more than a model organism to Dawe. Beautiful, accessible, and genetically expressive, the crop is tall, sturdy, and—with the male and female parts physically separate—very simple to cross. Read More: UGA Research Article
