Scott N. Keeney

Scott Keeney has made major contributions to our current understanding of how genetic recombination takes place during meiosis. Working initially in yeast, he discovered that the Spo11 protein is responsible for breaking chromosomal DNA at sites where recombination occurs. He extended this finding to demonstrate that Spo11 functions similarly during meiosis in mice, and elucidated the pathway from the binding of Spo11 to DNA to its release from the broken DNA ends. More recently he has characterized the chromatin dependence and feedback mechanisms that control the number of breaks and hence the extent and distribution of genetic recombination during meiosis.