Jeff Ellis

Dr. Jeff Ellis leads a research group in CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia that was among the first to clone and characterize plant disease resistance genes and describe their products as a new class of nucleotide binding site-leucine rich repeat proteins. His laboratory developed the Activator tagging system for cloning of the L6 and M rust resistance genes in flax in 1994 and 1997. L6 was one of the first cloned R genes. Since this time, the group has isolated a number of further genes that control other rust resistance specificities and have investigated the molecular basis of gene-for-gene resistance specificity through the study of chimeric L alleles in transgenic flax, showing that the leucine-rich repeat region is the main player. Dr. Ellis and his research team remain one of the leading laboratories in plant disease resistance research and this team has recently isolated and characterized the flax rust avirulence genes that correspond to the flax L5, L6 L7 and M resistance genes and using yeast two hybrid analysis, demonstrated that there is direct interaction between L6 and AvrL567 proteins. In addition to working with the model flax-flax rust system and the fundamental basis of rust resistance, the Ellis group has a strong grains industry focus on the delivery of improved rust resistance in wheat through increased efficiency of resistance breeding based on gene cloning and transfer and DNA marker technology. Dr. Ellis was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in May, 2009.