My favourite flowering image: an Aquilegia flower

Abstract

When I started my faculty position, I had a lot of ideas about new research projects, like most naïve assistant professors. In particular, I was interested in working on the evolution of petal identity, and the eudicot family Ranunculaceae (the buttercups) seemed especially promising. For over a century, botanists had suggested that the often bizarre petals of this family had evolved many times independently from outer whorls of stamens ( Prantl, 1888). I wanted to know whether there were any molecular signatures of these hypothesized parallel events. My original target genus was actually Ranunculus itself. I had already done some cloning and expression studies and knew that there were homeotic mutants available in the horticultural trade. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the genus also has a relatively large genome, wild variation in ploidy, a poorly resolved phylogeny, and serious seed dormancy. Not your best candidate for a new model system, even in the world of evo-devo. My next stop was the Kew C Value Database. A quick search revealed that the genus Aquilegia had the smallest genome in the family, a little over 300 Mbp ( Ingle et al., 1975), plus readily available homeotic mutants, a manageable number of interfertile species (~70; Munz, 1946), and a long history as a model for speciation processes ( Hodges and Arnold, 1994). In one of those strokes of luck that sometimes put you on a whole different path, I had recently been introduced to Scott A. Hodges from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an international expert on Aquilegia evolution, and he was just in the process of putting together a collaborative initiative with Justin Borevitz (Australian National University) and Magnus Nordborg (Gregor Mendel Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences) to develop genetic and genomic resources for the genus. Fifteen years later, we now have a fully sequenced reference genome along with more than a dozen re-sequenced species genomes ( Filiault et al., 2018), tractable RNAi-based tools for studying gene function (Gould and Kramer, 2007; Sharma and Kramer, 2013b), and a range of established molecular protocols. It is also a heck of a lot prettier than Arabidopsis (sorry, I have to be honest).