Jonathan Wendell, a leading expert on plant evolution and speciation and a professor at Iowa State University, spoke Thursday about the cotton genome and ploidy in a presentation titled “Genes, Jeans, Genomes, and the Amazing Cycle of Polyploidy in Plants.” Published research. Wendell spoke in Bilge Hall as part of the Botany Department Biology Colloquium.
Wendel’s research focuses on how plant genomes and phenotypes diversify, with a particular focus on whole-genome duplication, or polyploidization. According to Wendell, he has spent most of his career studying the genetics, systematics, and systematics of cotton, which he believes may be the most important crop species on the planet, both economically and culturally. It is said that there is.
Wendell said cotton comes from the more southern climates of the “New World” like North and South America.
“Cotton became the dominant plant in southern states and economies after Europeans enslaved Africans and made cotton cultivation economically viable and even annual,” Wendell said. “Cotton has spread all over the world and is today the most important textile plant in the world.”
During his presentation, Wendell showed a map of the different types of cotton used to make jeans, T-shirts, and bed sheets, as well as the cotton species used to make American currency.
Humans have been working with and processing cotton for thousands of years, Wendell says. Wendell’s images of wild cotton with its short, brown, attached fibers, whose directional choices over 5,000 years transformed the plan into what we know today, stronger, whiter, and with longer fibers. was shown.
Through his research, Wendell said he specifically studied how each species of cotton has multiple sets of genomes, and also discovered that all plants are actually polyploid. .
Wendell said cotton plants have 144 genomes and, if polyploid, each cell has about 500,000 genes.
Wendell’s research shows that polyploidy is followed by genome downsizing, with one genome downsizing while the other grows larger to balance out. said.
“Here the question arises: Why isn’t 1+1 equal to 2?” Wendell said.
This question will stimulate research into higher-order interactions beyond single cells, Wendel said.
