Jo Ann Banks

Active Mentor - currently hosting PULSe students for laboratory rotations and recruiting PULSe students into the laboratory; serves on preliminary exam committees

Current Research Interests:

Coordinator of the Selaginella genome sequence and its comparison to other plant genomes. See website: http://rna.genomics.purdue.edu/Archived_Items/Agry_600/Smo5_project for more information

Molecular basis of arsenic hyperaccumulation in the fern Pteris vittata. This fern is amazing as it tolerates and accumulates a lot of arsenic in its fronds. We will continue to discover and study the genes that are involved in this unusual trait.

Sex determination by pheromones in plants and the fern Ceratopteris in particular. Ceratopteris gametophytes develop as hermaphrodites or males, a decision dictated by a pheromone. We are using genetics and genomics approaches to understand how this pheromone regulates this important decision.

Selected Publications:

Indriolo, E., Ellis, D., Salt, D., and J. Banks. 2009. A vacuolar arsenite transporter necessary for arsenic tolerance in the arsenic hyperaccumulating fern Pteris vittata is missing in flowering plants. Submitted.

Banks, J. 2009. Selaginella and 400 million years of separation. Annu Rev Plant Biol. 60:223-38.

Chan, A., Melake-Berhan A., O'Brien K., Buckley S., Quan, H., Chen, D., Lewis M., Banks J., Rabinowicz PD. 2008. The highest-copy repeats are methylated in the small genome of the early divergent vascular plant Selaginella moellendorffii. BMC Genomics 12:282.

Banks, J. 2008. MicroRNA, sex determination and floral meristem determinacy in maize. Genome Biol. 30:204-207.

Hirano, K. +13 others. 2007. The GA perception mechanism mediated by the GID1/DELLA system is conserved in the lycophyte Selaginella moellendorffii but not in the bryophyte Physcomitrella patens. Plant Cell 19: 3058-3079.

Ellis D., Gumaelius L., Indriolo E., Pickering I, Banks J and D Salt. 2006. A unique arsenate reductase from the arsenic hyperaccumulating fern Pteris vittata. Plant Physiol. 141:1544-1554.

Wang W. (+15 others). 2005. Construction of a bacterial artificial chromosome library from the spikemoss Selaginella moellendorffii: a new resource for plant comparative genomics. BMC Plant Biol. 14:10.

Pickering IJ, Gumaelius L, Harris HH, Prince RC, Hirsch G, Banks JA, Salt DE, George GN. 2006. Localizing the biochemical transformations of arsenate in a hyperaccumulating fern. Environ Sci Technol. 40:5010-5014.