UK Plant Evolution 2014

Last updated: 3 Oct, 2014


Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, September 8–9, 2014.

 

The New Phytologist Trust is proud to be sponsoring UK Plant Evolution 2014 which is taking place in Edinburgh in September this year. 

 

**Abstract submission deadline has now passed. Registration deadline extended to Monday 25th August. **

 

Full details can be found below and in the linked pages.

 

Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh

Photo courtesy of Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh



The United Kingdom is home to exceptional evolutionary biologists. However, compared to the number of evolutionary zoologists, the number of their botanical counterparts is few. In many cases, U.K. plant evolutionary biologists are in small numbers at any one institution, and such isolation hinders progress.


The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh will host a conference on 8, 9 September, 2014 to help address this situation. The conference will showcase evolutionary research on plants by UK researchers to foster new collaborations. The conference will also hold a workshop, where discussion will identify challenges faced and suggest strategies to overcome them. We see this as a first step towards developing a longer-terms strategy for strengthening the UK community of plant evolutionary biologists.

The conference will include a poster and networking session, open speaking slots (both standard and "lightning" talks), as well as an exciting lineup of invited speakers.

For more information and to register, please visit the website at: http://symposium.bio.ed.ac.uk/ukplantevolution2014/
 

Invited UK speakers:

  • Mario Vallejo-Marin: "Invasive monkeyflowers as a model to study rapid evolution and speciation"
  • Richard Buggs: "Inferences from incongruences"
  • Patrik Nosil: "Genomic architecture and the dynamics of speciation"
  • Beverley Glover: "Evolution and development of specialised petal epidermal morphologies"
  • Toby Pennington: "Species-level phylogenetics of tropical plants: illuminating the evolutionary process"
  • Barbara Mable: "Investigating the impacts of gene and whole genome duplication in the modern sequencing era"
  • Bill Baker: "Tropical rain forest evolution: palms as a model group"
  • Simon Hiscock: "Mating system variation associated with polyploidy drives genetic divergence and ongoing speciation in Sorbus (Rosaceae)"
  • Rob Ness: "Variation in spontaneous mutation within a species and across the genome"
  • Deborah Charlesworth: "Studying the evolution of plant sex chromosomes"

Invited international speaker:

  • Dr. Spencer Barrett (University of Toronto): "Reproductive evolution at range limits"