This
symposium will provide a forum for the discussion of current
work in the field of plant developmental evolution, drawing from
a diverse selection of research topics. It will allow a broad
assessment of the state of the field, particularly in terms of
the success of candidate gene approaches. We are especially interested
in evaluating the utility of candidate gene approach in the study
of morphological evolution. The invited speakers work with both
monocots and dicots, in some cases making comparisons between
closely related taxa while, in others, covering distantly related
land plant lineages. One of the major goals of the symposium
is to foster communication between the invited molecular researchers
and the broader botanical community. This interaction will facilitate
the growth of plant developmental evolutionary biology and help
bring together questions related to morphology and genetics.
Leaves
R. Geeta, SUNY
Stony Brook, NY, USA
“Using leaf trees and taxon trees to understand leaf evolution”
Miltos
Tsiantis, Univ. of Oxford, UK
“Evolution of leaf form: Beyond KNOX genes”
John
Bowman, Univ. of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA
“Evolution of leaves in land plants.”
Inflorescences
David Baum, Univ.
of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
“A transgenic test of parallelism in plant architectural evolution”
Flowers
Quentin Cronk, University of British Columbia, Canada
“Zygomorphy in the rosids: occurrence, molecular genetics and ecology”
Amy
Litt, Yale Univ., New Haven, CT, USA
“Changes in gene structure and function in relation to floral evolution”
Elena
Kramer, Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, USA
“Variations on a theme: The evolutionary genetics of petal identity.”
Fruits
and seeds
Robert Kuzoff,
Univ. of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
“Unraveling the molecular- genetic basis of ovule shape disparities among
angiosperms.”
