Marcus Morton Rhoades (July 24, 1903 in Graham, Missouri – December 30, 1991) was an American cytogeneticist.
[3] His research on maize led to important discoveries for basic genetics and the applied science of plant breeding.
He was one of the first cytogenecists to document the pre-meiotic pairing of homologous chromosomes in maize, otherwise referred to as somatic pairing (Singh, 2003), and the first to document an instance of meiotic drive, a Mendelian inheritance caused by preferential segregation of certain versions of homologous chromosomes during meiosis.
Prof. Rollins A. Emerson continued and encouraged his students to become members, including Rhoades.
[8] In the 1940s, Rhoades served as the doctoral advisor of geneticist Ruth Sager at Columbia University.