Professor Leif Andersson awarded Wolf Prize
Professor Leif Andersson of the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University, has been awarded a 2014 Wolf Prize in Agriculture “for providing groundbreaking contributions to plant and animal sciences, respectively, by using modern technologies of genomic research”.
The Wolf Foundation has 1978 awarded prizes to outstanding scientists and artists in the subjects of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics and arts. The prize consists of a certificate and a prize sum of USD 100,000.
Leif Andersson has been awarded the prize together with professor Jorge Dubcovsky at the University of California Davis.
The Wolf Foundation writes:
“Prof. Andersson has led the path in the development of genomic and marker assisted selection as a means to identify superior breeding stock; these advances in livestock selection have replaced the more classical phenotypic selection methods and are an essential contribution to sustainable feeding of a growing world population. He is considered to be the world’s leading authority on the evolutionary genetics/genomics of animal domestication and particularly that of the domestic fowl. (...)
One of the central themes of his research has been to identify molecular genetic changes that underlie animal domestication. He was the first to use next generation sequencing to identify a “domestication gene”, and has unraveled the molecular basis of several examples of “variation under domestication” as originally suggested by Darwin.
By studying unique phenotypes accrued following domestication, Prof. Andersson recently identified and characterized several novel and fundamental mechanisms pertaining to muscle physiology, gene regulation and motor coordination; this discovery in horses has important implications for human diseases such as multiple sclerosis.”
Professor Leif Andersson was recently elected as a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
David Naylor