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Jane Grimwood Named HudsonAlpha Genomics Chair

Jane Grimwood standing with plants behind her on the left and a wooden column behind her on the right

(Courtesy of HudsonAlpha)

Congratulations to Jane Grimwood, who has been appointed the Loretta Purdy Spencer Chair in Genomics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology! Loretta Spencer served as a manyterm mayor of Huntsville, Alabama and is known for her contributions to rapidly growing the economy of Rocket City. Grimwood is also co-director of the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center.

Grimwood heads the Library Construction group for the JGI Plant Program. Her collaborations with the JGI began soon after the JGI was established to work on the Human Genome Project in 1997. She was a group lead at Stanford Human Genome Center directed by Richard Myers, and among the Center staff that moved to HudsonAlpha. At HudsonAlpha, she has continued to contribute across JGI plant genomes. She has appeared on the annual Highly Cited Researchers list assembly by Clarivate Analytics. In 2020, she was named a Yellowhammer Woman of Impact.

Notable large-scale multi-institutional JGI projects and resulting publications that Grimwood contributed to include:

  • A 2021 Nature paper announcing a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome, using samples from common gardens growing across the country. The national consortium involved researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, HudsonAlpha, and the JGI. Building off this work, researchers at three DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs) have expanded the network of common gardens and are exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing techniques.
  • A 2020 Nature Biotechnology paper on the release of the high quality reference genome sequence of green millet (Setaria viridis). The team of researchers at the Danforth Plant Science Center (Danforth Center), HudsonAlpha and the JGI also identified a gene related to seed dispersal in wild populations for the first time.
  • A 2020 Nature Genetics paper describing the genomes of the five major cotton lineages. Grimwood was also part of the JGI team that contributed to the multinational consortium of researchers that sequenced and assembled the simplest cotton genome (Gossypium raimondii) several years ago.

As well as the seminal Human Genome Project DOE Chromosome publications: