John Roth

Who is John Roth?

John R. Roth is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He became known for his early studies on the structure and regulation of the his operon of Salmonella, and went on to investigate regulation in systems as diverse as suppression by tRNA, NAD biosynthesis, and the Vitamin B12-dependent metabolism of small molecules such as ethanolamine and propanediol. In collaboration with David Botstein and Nancy Kleckner, he developed the use of transposons as genetic tools. As a by-product of his study of transposons, he developed an interest in chromosomal duplications, which are frequent in bacteria. He has recently authored several papers on the involvement of such small-effect mutations on evolution under selection. In 1988, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal of the Genetics Society of America.