Monty Jones international agricultural research for development institutions. He began his career at the Rice Research station in Sierra Leone, where he worked as a breeder for 13 years. His international career started with the CGIAR as coordinator of the IITA/USAID Cameroon rice program from 1987 to 1990. In 1991, Jones moved to the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) now known as AfricaRice Centre, to become its principal breeder. There, he led the team that successfully crossed the Asian and African rice species ("Oryza sativa" and "Oryza glaberrima"), producing the high-yield NERICA variety in collaboration with his fellow African scientists and
Plant genome assembly products were used to clone remaining gaps, and YACs allowed the characterization of telomere sequences. The resulting sequenced regions were 115.4 Mb of the 125 Mb predicted size of the genome and a total of 25,498 of protein-coding genes. To sequence and assemble the genome of Oryza Sativa (japonica), the same strategy was used. For Oryza Sativa a total of 3,401 mapped clones in a minimum tiling path were selected from the physical map and assembled. One of the most important crops in the world, maize (Zea mays), is the last plant genome project primarily based on Sanger BAC-by-BAC strategy.