Most of the things that people grow in their garden for
beautiful flowers are just mutants and what you give your loved one on
Valentine's day is some horrible homeotic mutant
in which all the sex organs have been converted to petals
like roses should only have, in wild
roses, only has five petals and so all those extra petals came from somewhere
and they came from conversions of the sexual organs to
male and female, the stamens and carpels, into additional petals.
So next time you give your loved one a rose or carnation
you're just giving them a horrible homeotic mutant for Valentine's day.
I'm originally from Montana
which is in the Northern Rockies in the United States just north of Yellowstone
National Park where I grew up, but it's cold.
My parents were very avid
outdoors people. We would go out all the time and camp.
Just a combination of geology and biology and being outside
I've always been interested in how the diversity of the life arose
and so eventually, it took me many years,
but we're coming back to evolution now in the lab.
These represent a member in the basal lineage
of liverworts. You could think of it as potentially retaining
some ancestral characters of what plants
first looked like when they crawled on to land.
All of the plants and animals we eat, don't look anything like
what their wild ancestors do and that's because what we've done is we've
selected particular organisms to go to the next generation with the traits that
suit humans, oftentimes not suiting their life in the wild.
The latest discovery we made with the genes controlling the
different generations, that's actually of interest to
agriculture in general because they like the idea of
maintaining hybrid seed without sex.
Most people try to think about their own life cycle
we have a body that's diploid, which means
it has two copies of every chromosome and if you're female you produce
eggs through meiosis and eggs have a single copy: they're
haploid, and males will produce sperm which
have a single copy of the chromosomes
and also being haploid, and when those two meet up again
they make a zygote, a diploid cell,
which eventually forms the embryo and a new generation.
In land plants, they have a diploid body
that produces haploid progeny
and the haploid progeny have their own multi cellular bodies and lives.
It would be as if our sperm and eggs,
we produced them, they developed into multi cellular organisms and went
out to a pub, met, mated, produced the next generation
without our diploid bodies ever knowing.
One goal would be for each farmer to produce their own hybrid seed.
It's more important for places where there are subsistence farming
if they could boost their yield by growing hybrids and not having to
purchase the hybrid seed it would be great.
Until about 1900, botany and medicine
were inextricably linked
and that was because most of our drugs come from plants.
in fact, Marchantia has secondary compounds that are
anti-microbial or anti-fungal
there's other ones that are being used as anti-cancer drugs
and tested for that, and so there is this diversity
of chemicals out there that nature has already made.
Hopefully it'll eventually come full circle again and
botany will be as valued as it once was.
The more we learn about how organisms are related to one another the more
we realise how almost all of our efforts in the past
have been focused just on a few little lineages of life
and yet there's all kinds of diversity out there that we didn't really appreciate