Gustavo Caetano-Anolles

Gustavo Caetano-Anollés (PhD) is Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an expert in the field of evolutionary genomics. He obtained his doctorate in biochemistry at the National University of La Plata in Argentina in 1986. During his early career at Ohio State University and the University of Tennessee he studied the symbiosis between nitrogen-fixing root nodule-forming bacteria and legumes from different angles, exploring the role of bacterial attachment and chemotaxis and plant systemic signals that control nodule number. While in Tennessee he co-invented the technique of DNA amplification with arbitrary primers [see DNA amplification fingerprinting (DAF) and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)]. This technique generates fingerprints of nucleic acids and molecular markers useful for genome mapping and molecular ecology and evolution. He also developed widely used methods for the silver staining of DNA that are commercially available. He holds several US patents in molecular biology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biology at the University of Oslo in 1998 and directed the laboratory of molecular ecology and evolution. Since 2003 he is at the University of Illinois and is an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology. He received the Emile Zuckerkandl Prize in molecular evolution in 2002. His current research integrates structural biology, genomics and molecular evolution. He is particularly interested in evolution of macromolecular structure. His group has recently reconstructed the history of the protein world using information in entire genomes, traced evolution of proteins in biological networks (see the MANET database), uncovered the origin of modern metabolism, and used genomic information to propose that Archaea was the first organismal lineage to arise from the common ancestor of all life. He is currently exploring the role of domain structure and organization in proteins and the evolution of functional RNA (e.g., ribosomal and transfer RNA).

Selected publications

• M.L. Wang, L.S. Yafremava, D. Caetano-Anollés, J.E. Mittenthal and G. Caetano-Anollés (2007) Reductive evolution of architectural repertoires in proteomes and the birth of the tripartite world. Genome Research 17: 1572-1585.
• G. Caetano-Anollés, S.H. Kim and J.E. Mittenthal (2007) The origins of modern metabolic networks inferred from phylogenomic analysis of protein structure. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences USA 10: 9358-9363.
• G. Caetano-Anollés (2002) Evolved RNA secondary structure and the rooting of the universal tree. Journal of Molecular Evolution 54:333-345.
• G. Caetano-Anollés (1996) Scanning of nucleic acids by in vitro amplification: new developments and applications. Nature Biotechnology 14: 1668-1674.
• G. Caetano-Anollés and P.M. Gresshoff (1991) Plant genetic control of nodulation. Annual Review in Microbiology 45:345-382.