Ignacio Chapela

Ignacio Chapela (born 1959) is a microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for a 2001 paper in Nature on the flow of transgenes into wild maize populations, as an outspoken critic of the University of California's ties to the biotechnology industry, as well as a later dispute with the University over denial of tenure that Chapela argued was politically motivated. Chapela is also notable for his work with natural resources and indigenous rights.

In the late 1980s, Chapela did his PhD dissertation research at Cardiff University on the ecology of microbial wood-rotting fungi. He continued research on a number of areas of fungal ecology through the 1990s, as a visiting scholar at various research institutions, private companies, and NGOs, finally settling at UC Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management (ESPM) since 1996.

He has worked on the symbiosis between leafcutter ants and their cultivated fungi. His research seems to indicate that some leaf-cutter ants have "domesticated" a single lineage of fungi for over 30 million years; Chapela is currently studying this symbiosis from evolutionary and agricultural perspectives, as well as looking for ways to manipulate it.

Chapela was co-author (with his graduate student, David Quist) of a controversial 2001 Nature paper about the flow of transgenes into wild Zea mays ssp. mexicana in mountains of Oaxaca in Southwestern Mexico -a culturally significant region known as the Mesoamerican center of origin for Zea mays L. Controversy over the accuracy of the claims and methodological concerns about the paper led to an editor's note saying there was insufficient evidence to justify the original publication. Advocates of GM crops widely, and erroneously, called this a retraction.

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