Year

Name of scientist

Contribution

1800

Schleidan & Schwaan

Cell Theory

1902

Gottlieb Haberlandt

First attempt of plant tissue culture (Father of Plant Tissue culture)

1904

Hanning

First attempt to culture embryo of selected crucifers

1922

Robbins

In vitro culture of root tips

1934

White

Successful culture of tomato roots

1941

Van Overbeek

Use of coconut milk containing a cell division factor for the first time to culture Datura embryos

1952

Morel & Martin

Use of meristem culture to obtain virus-free Dahlias

1952

Morel & Martin

First application of micro grafting

1954

Muir et al.

First plant regenerated from a single cell

1956

Kornberg et al.

In vitro synthesis of DNA

1962

Murashige & Skoog

Development of MS nutrition medium

1964

Guha & Maheshori

Production of first haploid plants from pollen grains of Datura (Anther culture)

1968

Meselson and Yuan

Coined the term “Restrict ion endonuclease” to describe a class of enzymes involved in cleaving DNA

1970

Power et al.

First achievement of protoplast fusion

1970

Kelly & Smith

Smith Discovery of first restriction endonuclease from Haemophillus influenzae. It was later purified and named Hind 11

1971

Takabe et al.

Regeneration of first plants from protoplasts

1972

Jackson et al.

First recombinant DNA molecule produced by using restriction enzymes

1977

Maxam & Gilbert

Gene sequencing based on degradation of DNA chain

1978

Melchers et al.

Somatic hybridization of tomato and potato resulting in Pomato

1980

Eli Lilly and Co.

Commercial production of human insulin through genetic engineering in bacterial cells

1980

Eli Lilly and Co.

RFLP technique developed

1981

Larkin and Scowcroft

Introduction of the term somaclonal variation

1983

Kary B. Mullis

Conceived the idea of Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a chemical DNA amplification process

1984

Alec Jeffreys

Development of the genetic fingerprinting technique for identifying individuals by analyzing polymorphism

1987

Barton et al.

Isolation of Bt gene for bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis)

1990

Williams et al.; Welsh and McClelland

Development of the Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) technique

1997

Blattner et al

Sequencing of E coli genome

2001

Human Genome project consortium and Venter et al.

Sequencing of human genome successfully completed

2005

International Rice Genome Sequencing Project

Map based sequence of rice genome