Dani Zamir

Biosketch

I was born in 1950 in Jerusalem Israel and studied Agronomy at the Faculty of Agriculture in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After graduating in 1977 I continued my studies at the University of California at David where I obtained my MSc in Vegetable Crops (1978) and my PhD in Genetics (1981). My thesis dealt with developing haploid selection approaches to improve low temperature tolerance in tomato. While working as a teaching assistant to Prof. Charles Rick I was introduced to his rich tomato germplasm collection and the value of wild species for crop improvement. In 1981 I returned to Israel to the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University where my work has focused on developing methods to enhance the rate of transfer of traits from wild species to the tomato crop. For my work on tomato, I received the EMET Prize in Agriculture (2015), the Israel Prize in Agriculture (2020) and was elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Research Interests

Is there a limit to crop yield? This is the question my research has been addressing over the past 40 years using tomato as a model crop and natural biodiversity as the source of new traits. To enhance the rate of progress in breeding, our lab has generated and shared with the community full coverage 'exotic libraries' in the form of introgression lines (ILs) and backcross inbred lines (BILs) that were later developed for additional crops. Such populations enabled the mapping and cloning of disease resistance genes, yield associated QTL and genes that drive yield heterosis via over-dominance and epistasis. Beyond the science my interest is to see some of the discovered traits implemented in modern tomato varieties. Indeed, some of the traits we identified have been incorporated into the leading tomato hybrids showing that natural biodiversity is the major avenue to break yield barriers in plant breeding.