DNA goggles

Tim Harvey zigur@hotmail.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 23:15:49 PST

You'd better let Kew know. Their sequencing labs are unable to identify unknowns at the generic level - and that was a lab specialising in a particular family!
 
 T
 

 
> Yep. Based on current technology (and all the resources at my disposal), I
> can tell you how many individual plants there are, how many populations,
> how many genera, families, order...etc. I can even tell if a plant is a
> hybrid, what diseases it has, what and how many taxa of microbes live on or
> within it, what beneficial fungi it is associated with. I can tell you what
> it's chromosome counts are, how many functional genes it has, how the
> chromosomes rearranged themselves over time, how the genes rearranged
> themselves over time. Then I can infer each plant's evolutionary path and
> make an educated guess as to how old the species is and more and more. And
> all of this is only possible because of the many years of work botanists,
> ecologists, microbiologists, and evolutionary biologists have spent
> gathering knowledge. We compare what we know today to what was known
> yesterday.
> 
 		 	   		  



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