Aaron J. Windsor

TL;DR: Papaya offers numerous advantages as a system for fruit-tree functional genomics, and this draft genome sequence provides the foundation for revealing the basis of Carica’s distinguishing morpho-physiological, medicinal and nutritional properties.

TL;DR: This work investigates whether plants show evidence of adaptive evolution using an extension of the McDonald-Kreitman test that explicitly models slightly deleterious mutations by estimating the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations.

TL;DR: The results show that gene duplication, neofunctionalization, and positive selection provide the mechanism for biochemical adaptation in plant defense and their fundamental importance for the evolution of plant metabolic diversity both within and among species.

TL;DR: The authors cloned a quantitative trait locus that controls plant defensive chemistry, damage by insect herbivores, survival, and reproduction in the natural environments where this polymorphism evolved, and Ecological interactions in diverse environments likely contribute to the widespread polymorphism of this biochemical function.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed leaf glucosinolate profiles from members of the Brassicaceae that have diverged from Arabidopsis thaliana within the last 15 million years and interpreted their findings relative to the phylogeny of this group.