[1] Upon his arrival at Rutgers in 1985, Jo Messing initiated research activity on computational and structural biology and further emphasis on molecular genetics of the regulation of gene expression and biomolecular interactions.

[8] Jo Messing was a pharmacist by training, but specialized in molecular biology during his PhD-research at the LM University of Munich and the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry.

In the late seventies and early eighties, Jo Messing and his colleagues developed the shotgun DNA sequencing method with single and paired synthetic universal primers.

The method is based on fragmenting DNA into small sizes, purifying them by cloning, and defining the start of sequencing with a short oligonucleotide.

Applied research in these genomic sequences permitted his laboratory to study the organization and evolution of the genes that control the supply of proteins for nutrition and as sources of biofuel.