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Brian Staskawicz Awarded Wolf Prize in Agriculture

March 11, 2025
By: Mathew Burciaga
image of man smiling with trees and leaves in the background
Brian Staskawicz. Photo by Mathew Burciaga

Brian Staskawicz, a professor of the graduate school in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the 2025 Wolf Prize in Agriculture in recognition of his groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants.

The Wolf Prize is an international award granted by the Wolf Foundation in six categories: agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. The prize in the agriculture category is often referred to as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in agriculture. The award is shared with Sainsbury Laboratory researcher Jonathan Jones and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill biologist Jeffery Dangl, whose research also shaped the field of plant immunity and opened up new strategies to enhance resistance and control a broad spectrum of plant diseases.

“Our work began in the mid-1980s and continues to this day. Between the three of us, we’ve mentored numerous graduate students and postdocs who have gone on to establish their own labs and make significant contributions to the field,” said Staskawicz. “It’s an honor to receive this award, especially since plant pathology is often overlooked in such recognitions.”

For years, scientists recognized that individuals of the same plant species exhibit varying disease resistance levels due to dominant alleles at resistance genes. The “gene-for-gene” hypothesis suggested plant disease resistance gene products interact with pathogen avirulence-gene products. However, the nature of and functions encoded by plant disease resistance genes remained largely unknown.

Staskawicz, who completed his PhD in plant pathology at UC Berkeley in 1980, identified the first bacterial avirulence effector gene, providing crucial molecular evidence supporting the “gene-for-gene” theory. This discovery, alongside parallel work by Jones and Dangl, opened up the field of plant immunity. Staskawicz was also the first to show that bacterial avirulence proteins can have virulence functions inside the plant cell.

Staskawicz was among the first to clone the pathogen effector gene and characterized one of the first nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) in plants, which detect the presence of pathogens and initiate some form of an immune response. His research helped establish Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism to study the molecular basis of microbial recognition by plants and genetically dissect defense signaling pathways.

“Brian is a pioneer in plant pathogenesis, and the award is very much deserved,” said David Savage, a professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. “Because of Brian and other colleagues in the field, our knowledge of the plant innate immune system has grown tremendously. Studying plants at this basic science level and understanding their immune defenses ultimately has helped us understand the human immune system as well.”

Since 2017, Staskawicz has served as Director of Sustainable Agriculture at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), which focuses on understanding the molecular basis of plant-pathogen interactions and immunity, expanding CRISPR-Cas genome editing technology in plants, and engineering disease-resistant and drought-tolerant crops for agricultural sustainability. 

“With climate change, we are facing plant disease pandemics that threaten global food security,” he said. “Sustainable solutions are crucial, as current disease control relies heavily on pesticides—a fossil fuel-driven industry that is both unsustainable and vulnerable to pathogen resistance.” IGI research teams led by Staskawicz, Savage, and other collaborators are exploring ways to improve the photosynthetic efficiency and root development of rice, which aligns with the larger goal of enhancing the natural ability of plants and soil microbes to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in agricultural soils.

In addition to the Wolf Prize, Staskawicz has been honored by the United States Department of Agriculture, the American Phytopathological Society (APS), and several other organizations. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the APS and the American Society for Microbiology, and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. 

And even after retiring in 2023 after more than 40 years of teaching, Staskawicz continues to lead groundbreaking research. “I have the best job in the world,” he said. “Science feels like a hobby to me; I still wake up at 3 a.m. thinking about experiments.

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