James Kadonaga


James T. Kadonaga is an American biologist, currently the Amylin Endowed Chair in Lifesciences at University of California, San Diego.

Education

Kadonga has a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1980 from MIT, where he received the Alpha Chi Sigma Prize and the American Institute of Chemists Certificate. His then completed his A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry at Harvard University under Jeremy R. Knowles. He was a DuPont Fellow.
Following his graduate studies, Kadonaga joined Robert Tjian’s lab at Berkeley as a postdoc, where he developed sequence-specific DNA affinity chromatography and helped purify transcription factors such as Sp1. Kadonaga joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego.
Kadonaga’s laboratory has made major contributions to understanding how RNA polymerase II transcription is regulated in the context of chromatin. His work has included the purification and analysis of promoter- and enhancer-binding factors; early demonstrations that activators counteract chromatin-mediated transcription repression; and the elucidation of the enzymatic machinery that assembles chromatin, leading to the discovery of ACF and ASF1 chromatin assembly factors, as well as the prenucleosome intermediate. His group also discovered NDF, a nucleosome destabilizing factor that enhances transcriptional elongation, and identified annealing helicases, ATP-driven enzymes that catalyze the rewinding of complementary DNA strands. In addition, his lab has defined new core promoter elements beyond the classic TATA box, including the DPE, MTE, and TCT motifs, and revealed their roles in transcriptional networks such as Hox genes and translation.
Today, Kadonaga continues to explore the mechanisms of gene regulation, often emphasizing science as exploration — “we don’t know what’s around the next corner” — while training generations of scientists in transcription and chromatin biology.

Awards