Savithramma Dinesh Kumar

Dr. Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar was born in Bhadravathi, India, and he received his BSc and MSc in genetics from the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bengaluru, India. Following a brief period as an instructor, he moved to the United States and received his PhD in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from Iowa State University. He received a Life Science Research Fellowship, which funded his post-doctoral work at the USDA–ARS Plant Gene Expression Center (PGEC) and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1999, he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University; he advanced to associate professor in 2004. In 2010, he moved to the Department of Plant Biology at the University of California, Davis, where he is now a professor and the department chair and a professor in The Genome Center.

Dinesh-Kumar is internationally recognized for his significant contributions to understanding the molecular basis of plant immune responses to pathogen infections. His PhD dissertation research in Dr. Allen Miller's laboratory was a harbinger of the seminal contributions that have followed. Dinesh-Kumar revealed the leaky-scanning and translational read-through mechanisms employed by barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) to produce three different proteins under the direction of a single subgenomic RNA. He also constructed the first successful BYDV infectious clone. Subsequently, he pursued post-doctoral research in Dr. Barbara Baker's laboratory at PGEC–University of California, Berkeley. There, he was involved in cloning the first virus resistance gene, N, that confers resistance to tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Dinesh-Kumar's insightful analysis identified the amino end of the N protein as resembling Drosophila Toll and mammalian Interleukin-1 receptor, now referred to as the “Toll-Interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) homology domain." This was the first TIR domain identified in plants and was identified long before mammalian Toll-like receptors were identified. The TIR receptor domain-containing nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) class immune receptors are now recognized as universal receptors that function in plant and animal immunity. In addition to elucidating the roles of various N protein domains, Dinesh-Kumar's work described the role of alternative splicing in N function—a phenomenon documented only later in other systems. Most of what we know about N can be attributed to his work.