In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I at Stanford University began tinkering with an interesting weed, the small flowering mustard plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. We set out to study genes involved in controlling the growth and appearance of this lauded model organism, and using molecular cloning and transgenics, we identified a novel family of plant homeobox genes.This experiment proved valuable in a number of respects. First, we showed we could hasten or slow the rate of plant development by al

Foundations | The First Array Courtesy of Mark Schema Ron Davis and I were studying plant transcription factors in 1990, but progress was slow and arduous because the gene expression tools were so primitive. We conceived of the DNA microarray in 1993 to speed up gene expression analysis by combining biology and high technology. We adapted Affymetrix VLSIPS technology to synthesize yeast microarrays, and measured gene expression in yeast cells by hybridizing fluorescent probes derived from