Plant Molecular Evolution

Plant molecular biology has produced an ever-increasing flood of data about genes and genomes. Evolutionary biology and systematics provides the context for synthesizing this information. This book brings together contributions from evolutionary biologists, systematists, developmental geneticists, biochemists, and others working on diverse aspects of plant biology whose work touches to varying degrees on plant molecular evolution. The book is organized in three parts, the first of which introduces broad topics in evolutionary biology and summarizes advances in plant molecular phylogenetics, with emphasis on model plant systems. The second segment presents a series of case studies of gene family evolution, while the third gives overviews of the evolution of important plant processes such as disease resistance, nodulation, hybridization, transposable elements and genome evolution, and polyploidy.

`...tantalizing sampler of how two of the main menus of current biological research...can join and produce much richer results. ...this [first of Section 1] article provides one of the best expositions of the essential issues in contemporary molecular systematics...recommend it as required reading for any advanced student of evolutionary biology. The second chapter...contributes an excellent and readable explanation of the basic logical assumptions and statistical methods of likelihood estimation. ...extremely well and clearly written [two chapters in the third section]... Plant Molecular Evolution nicely complements recent contributions... (Soltis et al. 1998)...deserves a place in the library of any plant evolutionary biologist or molecular biologist.' Plant Systematics and Evolution, 226:1-2 (2001)