Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia (UGA).
Bennetzen is known for his work describing codon usage bias in yeast, and E. coli; being the first to clone and sequence an active transposon in plants,[1] discovering that most of the DNA in plant genomes was a particular class of mobile DNA (LTR-retrotransposons); [2] solving the C-value paradox; proposing sorghum and Setaria as model grasses; showing that rice centromeres were hotspots for recombination, but not crossovers; and developing a technique to date polyploidization events.
After two decades at Purdue, he joined the faculty at UGA in 2003 as a Professor of Genetics, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and Giles Chair in Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics.
In 2016, he established labs at Anhui Agricultural University and the Yunnan Academy of Forestry to study the molecular genetics of tea (Camellia sinensis) and two Chinese native oil trees, Camellia oleifera and Malania oleifera.
Bennetzen's research interests include plant genome structure/evolution and gene function relationships, transposable element (TE) biology, genetic diversity in under-utilized crops of the developing world, rapid evolution of complex disease resistance loci in plants, recombinational analysis, the coevolution of plant/microbe and plant/parasite interactions, the genetic basis of quality traits in tea and other important crops, and soil/root microbiomics.