David A. Lightfoot

Biography

Dr. Lightfoot is PhD in Genetics and Professor for Biotechnology and Genomics at SIUC. He is Head of the Genomic Science Facility at SIUC. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors. He was an Illinois Humanities Commission Road Scholar. He won Illinois Soybean Researcher of the year twice. He has published 178 peer reviewed articles, one book, sixteen book chapters, and thousands of DNA sequences. He has been awarded patent rights to 4 inventions. He has trained 14 PhD and 29 MS students.

Research Interest

Dr. Lightfoot He works on novel gene discovery by genomics, particularly methods to decode and use the DNA sequences of chromosomes. He targets commercially valuable disease resistances, phyto-pharmaceuticals, crop yield boosting elements and latterly human genetics. His research projects are, or have been, funded by the NSF, USDA, USB, ISPOB, CFAR and industrial sponsors. He is involved in collaborations with twenty one SIUC faculty in eighteen additional projects. He collaborates with 85 scientist nationally and 157 scientist worldwide. Dr Lightfoot has made exceptional contributions in three areas. First, starting in 1997 he led the team that created the first physical map of a crop plant genome. The map was only the second made for broad leaved plant species. The second area of exceptional contributions has come in the field of soybean genetics. Starting in 1991 Dr. Lightfoot developed a novel and inventive genetic system using immortal soybean lines (RILs and NILs) that has allowed the identification of over 100 loci of economic importance, their verification and for allows for the identification of the underlying genes. The third area of excellence is particularly meritorious because it is broad in applications to all crop plants. The glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) gene technology was introduced to plants by Dr. Lightfoot. In reducing to practice he discovered new and surprising effects of the gene including biomass increase, herbicide tolerance, drought tolerance, higher nutritional value of plant parts and reduced contamination of foods by carcinogenic aflatoxins.