The evolution of floral identity genes
Jacob O. Brunkard (Graduate Student), Professor Patricia C. Zambryski , Anne M. Runkel (Graduate Student) Photo by Queena Xu
Graduate students Jake Brunkard and Anne Runkel of the Zambryski lab recently published a commentary in Science, summarized as follows:
Last year, Sayou et al. published a study about the evolution of a plant-specific transcription factor, LEAFY (Science 343:645-648, 2014). They argued that LEAFY evolved new functions while remaining a single copy gene. In response, we wrote a comment arguing that LEAFY instead evolved through gene duplications and subsequent gene loss (Science 347:621, 2015).