Weeds, dandellions

http://www3.botany.ubc.ca/rieseberglab/people/nolan_kane.html

The Asteraceae (Compositae), with nearly 25,000 named species, is the largest plant family, with numerous important crops (sunflower, safflower, lettuce, artichoke, endive, chicory and many more), noxious weeds (e.g. knapweeds, thistles, dandelions) and ecologically important wild species (silverswords, Artemisia, Senecio), yet has no sequenced genome due to the prohibitively large genome sizes of most Asteraceae species.  This lack of genomic information has limited our ability to understand the roles of natural selection, artificial selection and gene flow in shaping both wild and domesticated members of the Asteraceae, and to better characterize the enzymes responsible for the diverse secondary metabolites in medicinally important species.

http://www3.botany.ubc.ca/rieseberglab/research.html

Invasive plants represent a major threat to the economy and environment, with annual economic costs to North America of $35-40 billion. In collaboration with laboratories at UBC (S. Otto, J. Whitton, and K. Adams) and Indiana University (Z. Lao, Jim Bever, and K. Clay), we are using common garden experiments, microarray analyses (Genetics 179:1881-1890), and hitchhiking and association mapping with next generation sequence data to identify specific genetic changes associated with invasiveness. By targeting Compositae weeds for this work – diffuse knapweed, starthistle, Canada thistle, ragweed, and common sunflower – we can exploit the genomic tools and resources developed by the Compositae Genome Project (see below).