Marcus Morton Rhoades (July 24, 1903 in Graham, Missouri - December 30, 1991) was an American cytogeneticist. His research on maize led to important discoveries for basic genetics and the applied science of plant breeding.He was one of the first cytogenecists to document the pre-meiotic pairing of homologous chromosomes in maize, otherwise referred as somatic pairing (Singh, 2003).