| Citation | Jones has made several outstanding contributions to our understanding of DNA transposition and disease resistance. His early pioneering work provided unique insights into the mechanisms underlying the behaviour of maize transposable elements and chromosome breakage. He was a joint winner in the race to isolate plant disease resistance genes, showing that they encode a novel family of recognition proteins of general significance for plant and animal immunity. His work has provided major insights into the evolution of plant disease resistance, showing that the amino acids that are likely to be directly involved in pathogen recognition are hypervariable and under the influence of divergent selection. He has therefore opened up new and exciting avenues for research into plant recognition, signal transduction and evolution. |