Brandon Gaut

Last updated
Brandon S. Gaut
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Riverside
PartnerRebecca Gaut
Awards
  • Sloan Foundation Young Investigator Fellowship (1995-1997)
  • AAAS Fellow (2008)
  • Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award (2025)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions University of California, Irvine
Doctoral advisor Michael T. Clegg
Notable students Aoife McLysaght
Adam Eyre-Walker

Brandon Stuart Gaut is an American evolutionary biologist and geneticist who works as a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. [1]

Contents

Gaut's research focuses on the evolution of genetic variation in populations and its impact on adaptation, speciation, and the maintenance of biodiversity, as well as the evolution of transposable elements and their role in shaping genetic architecture and epigenetic state in plants. [2] [3]

Education

Gaut earned his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Genetics from UC Riverside from 1988–1992, under the mentorship of Michael T. Clegg. [4]  He was a postdoc at NC State University in the Department of Statistics under Bruce Weir until 1995 before becoming an assistant professor at Rutgers University in 1995. He moved to UC Irvine in 1998 and was named a Distinguished professor in 2020. [5]  

Career

Gaut served as the president-elect, president and past-president for the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution from 2013 to 2015. [6]   He is Editor-in-Chief for Molecular Biology and Evolution . [7]  He served administrative roles as Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from 2006–2013 [4] and the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Biological Sciences from 2017–2022.[ citation needed ]

Gaut was named the Professor of the Year in 2008 at UC Irvine and voted an Outstanding Professor by the senior class. [4]  In 2025, he was awarded the inaugural Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award. [8] [9]

Research

Gaut's early work provided several fundamental ideas about the genetic effects of domestication on crop plants; with postdoctoral scholar Adam Eyre-Walker, he used coalescent theory-based models to establish the occurrence of genetic bottlenecks during the domestication of maize, [10] [11] a phenomenon which is now thought to influence the diversity and genome content of many agriculturally important species. [12] [13] He later adopted these models to initiate the search for genes that have been selected through the domestication process, estimating that around 1,200 maize genes (~3% of loci) were involved in its domestication. [14] This work established basic approaches that have been adopted across numerous domesticated species. [15]

Together with John Doebley, Gaut provided the first DNA sequence-based estimates for the time of polyploidization event in a plant, [16] [17] and he has contributed to basic methods used in evolutionary studies, such as the codon model of evolution. [18] [19] Later he characterized important epigenetic phenomena, showing that DNA methylation of transposable elements affects gene expression on a genome-wide scale and is a component of selective load [20] [21] [22] and that genic methylation in plants is evolutionarily conserved. [23]

Gaut's more recent research has focused on genome evolution in grapes, estimating the demographic history of grape domestication and showing that cultivated grapes possess an abundance of deleterious mutations in a heterozygous state compared to their wild progenitor species, [24] likely due to their history of clonal propagation. [25] His lab also identified loci which may confer resistance to the agriculturally destructive bacterium Xylella fastidiosa . [26] [27]

Gaut has used experimental evolution of E. coli to characterize the extent of epistasis and antagonistic pleiotropy in the evolutionary process. [28]

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ "UC Irvine - Faculty Profile System". faculty.uci.edu. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  2. ↑ "Brandon Gaut". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  3. ↑ Conduct, Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms: Recommendations for Responsible; Sciences, Board on Life; Studies, Division on Earth and Life; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering (2016-07-28), "Biographical Sketches of Committee Members", Gene Drives on the Horizon: Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research with Public Values, National Academies Press (US), retrieved 2023-09-17
  4. 1 2 3 "In Evolution's Garden". The Scientist Magazine. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  5. ↑ "Distinguished Professor – Academic Personnel" . Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  6. ↑ "SMBE Editors and Council". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 31 (12): i3. 2014-12-01. doi:10.1093/molbev/msu015. ISSN   0737-4038.
  7. ↑ "About MBE". academic.oup.com. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  8. ↑ "Distinguished professor proves effective mentorship is both art and science". Genes to Genomes. Retrieved 2025-05-27.
  9. ↑ "Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award". Genetics Society of America. Retrieved 2025-05-27.
  10. ↑ Eyre-Walker, Adam; Gaut, Rebecca L.; Hilton, Holly; Feldman, Dawn L.; Gaut, Brandon S. (1998-04-14). "Investigation of the bottleneck leading to the domestication of maize". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 95 (8) (published April 14, 1998): 4441–4446. Bibcode:1998PNAS...95.4441E. doi: 10.1073/pnas.95.8.4441 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   22508 . PMID   9539756.
  11. ↑ Buckler, Ed. "Maize Domestication". bucklerlab. Retrieved 2025-05-27.
  12. ↑ Doebley, John F.; Gaut, Brandon S.; Smith, Bruce D. (December 2006). "The Molecular Genetics of Crop Domestication". Cell. 127 (7): 1309–1321. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2006.12.006 . ISSN   0092-8674. PMID   17190597. S2CID   278993.
  13. ↑ Meyer, Rachel S.; Purugganan, Michael D. (December 2013). "Evolution of crop species: genetics of domestication and diversification" . Nature Reviews Genetics. 14 (12): 840–852. doi:10.1038/nrg3605. ISSN   1471-0064. PMID   24240513. S2CID   529535.
  14. ↑ Wright, Stephen I.; Bi, Irie Vroh; Schroeder, Steve G.; Yamasaki, Masanori; Doebley, John F.; McMullen, Michael D.; Gaut, Brandon S. (2005-05-27). "The Effects of Artificial Selection on the Maize Genome" . Science. 308 (5726): 1310–1314. doi:10.1126/science.1107891. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   15919994. S2CID   25581643.
  15. ↑ Morrell, Peter L.; Buckler, Edward S.; Ross-Ibarra, Jeffrey (February 2012). "Crop genomics: advances and applications" . Nature Reviews Genetics. 13 (2): 85–96. doi:10.1038/nrg3097. ISSN   1471-0064. PMID   22207165. S2CID   13358998.
  16. ↑ Gaut, Brandon S.; Doebley, John F. (1997-06-24). "DNA sequence evidence for the segmental allotetraploid origin of maize". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 94 (13): 6809–6814. Bibcode:1997PNAS...94.6809G. doi: 10.1073/pnas.94.13.6809 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   21240 . PMID   11038553.
  17. ↑ Force, Allan; Lynch, Michael; Pickett, Bryan; Amores, Angel; Yan, Yi-lin; Postlethwait, John (1999). "Preservation of Duplicate Genes by Complementary, Degenerative Mutations". Genetics. pp. 1531–1545. doi:10.1093/genetics/151.4.1531. PMC   1460548 . PMID   10101175 . Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  18. ↑ Muse, S. V.; Gaut, B. S. (September 1994). "A likelihood approach for comparing synonymous and nonsynonymous nucleotide substitution rates, with application to the chloroplast genome". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 11 (5): 715–724. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a040152 . ISSN   1537-1719. PMID   7968485.
  19. ↑ Kosakovsky Pond, Sergei; Frost, Simon (2005). "Not So Different After All: A Comparison of Methods for Detecting Amino Acid Sites Under Selection". Molecular Biology and Evolution. pp. 1208–1222. doi:10.1093/molbev/msi105. PMID   15703242 . Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  20. ↑ Hollister, Jesse D.; Gaut, Brandon S. (August 2009). "Epigenetic silencing of transposable elements: A trade-off between reduced transposition and deleterious effects on neighboring gene expression". Genome Research. 19 (8): 1419–1428. doi:10.1101/gr.091678.109. ISSN   1088-9051. PMC   2720190 . PMID   19478138.
  21. ↑ Hollister, Jesse D.; Smith, Lisa M.; Guo, Ya-Long; Ott, Felix; Weigel, Detlef; Gaut, Brandon S. (2011-02-08). "Transposable elements and small RNAs contribute to gene expression divergence between Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis lyrata". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (6): 2322–2327. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.2322H. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018222108 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   3038775 . PMID   21252301.
  22. ↑ Choi, Jae Young; Lee, Yuh Chwen G. (2020-07-16). "Double-edged sword: The evolutionary consequences of the epigenetic silencing of transposable elements". PLOS Genetics. 16 (7): e1008872. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008872 . ISSN   1553-7404. PMC   7365398 . PMID   32673310.
  23. ↑ Takuno, Shohei; Gaut, Brandon S. (2013-01-29). "Gene body methylation is conserved between plant orthologs and is of evolutionary consequence". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (5): 1797–1802. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.1797T. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1215380110 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   3562806 . PMID   23319627.
  24. ↑ "Top 10 Genomics News Stories of 2019". Genomics Research from Technology Networks. Retrieved 2025-05-27.
  25. ↑ Huang, Xuehui; Huang, Sanwen; Han, Bin; Li, Jiayang (July 2022). "The integrated genomics of crop domestication and breeding". Cell. 185 (15): 2828–2839. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.04.036 . ISSN   0092-8674. PMID   35643084. S2CID   249103057.
  26. ↑ Quinton, Amy M. (2023-06-15). "Study Reveals Potential Breakthrough in Grapevine Disease Resistance". UC Davis. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  27. ↑ California, University of; Irvine. "Study reveals potential breakthrough in grapevine disease resistance". phys.org. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  28. ↑ Batarseh, Tiffany N; Batarseh, Sarah N; Rodríguez-Verdugo, Alejandra; Gaut, Brandon S (May 2023). "Phenotypic and Genotypic Adaptation of Escherichia coli to Thermal Stress is Contingent on Genetic Background". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 40 (5). doi:10.1093/molbev/msad108. ISSN   0737-4038. PMC   10195153 . PMID   37140066.
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