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Dr. Dangl is currently the John N. Couch Professor in the Biology Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The focus of his research and teaching endeavors are the study of the processes of information flow between plants and plant pathogens. Through his contributions to research, membership on editorial boards (including the journal Cell) and expert panels, Dr. Dangl has played a significant international role in the advancement of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism for plant biology research. After completing his Ph.D. on segmental flexibility of genetically engineered monoclonal antibodies at Stanford University in 1986, Dr. Dangl moved into the area of plant defense at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding. He is a founding member of the Max Delbrueck Laboratory in Cologne, Germany where he and his group pioneered the use of A. thaliana to study the genetics of plant resistance to bacterial pathogens. His group isolated the RPM1 gene, one of the first cloned plant resistance genes that enabled the identification of the nucleotide binding site–leucine rich repeat (NBS-LRR) proteins as components of the principal pathogen detection system in plants. Since moving to North Carolina in 1996, Dr. Dangl has continued to use a set of genetic, cell biology and genomics approaches to define and unravel both A. thaliana disease resistance networks and the biology of the bacterial plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae. More recently, his lab has uncovered the process by which bacterial effector molecules, which are delivered to plant cells by specialized bacterial transporters, are acted upon by host fatty acid acylation enzymes for targeting to the plasma membrane. The biological function of these effector molecules in plant disease is currently a focal point in the study of plant-pathogen interactions. | 