The Tree of Life Initiative
Building on the success of PAFTOL, the Tree of Life initiative is expanding and populating the tree of life for plants and fungi.
Tree of LifeCharacter Evolution
Exploring genomic, physiological, phenotypic and ecological traits to understand the drivers and processes underpinning global plant and fungal diversity.
Team lead: Dr Ilia Leitch
Investigating the evolution of plant and fungal traits and their responses to global change.
The Character Evolution team conducts research on specific traits that cut across plant and fungal lineages. We focus on a wide range of genomic, structural, chemical and ecological traits within a comparative evolutionary framework to understand the drivers and processes underpinning global plant and fungal diversity.
Our research uses diverse datasets associated with Kew’s scientific and living collections. Ongoing collecting and digitisation activities are contributing to the growth of these publicly available datasets.
We aim to analyse our data with increasingly sophisticated phylogenetic and ecological modelling approaches. This will lead to a greater understanding of how different traits interact and evolve to generate plant and fungal diversity, how key traits can influence or be influenced by evolutionary and ecosystem processes, and how these insights can predict plant and fungal responses to global environmental change.
Team members
Senior Research Leader
Dr Ilia Leitch
Senior Research Leader Plant Structure
Dr Paula Rudall
Research leaders
Dr Sidonie Bellot
Research Fellow
Dr Jan Hackel
Dr Marybel Soto Gomez
Research Assistant
Sahr Mian
Jason Stevenson
Post-doctoral researcher
Ben Kuhnhaeuser
Honorary research associates
Professor Richard Bateman
Dr Oriane Hidalgo
Dr Jaume Pellicer
Honorary research fellows
Professor Michael David Bennett
Peter Brandham
PhD students
Marie Henniges
Joe Morton
Projects
Darwin Tree of Life
With species under threat from climate change and human development, genetic data can help conserve global biodiversity for future generations.
Darwin Tree of Life
Evolution and diversification of the palms and their seed traits
The palm tree-of-life as a key to palm seed conservation. Phylogenomic research in support of the Global Tree Seed Bank project.
Evolution and diversification of palms
Evolution of Asteraceae in the European Alps
Improving our understanding of the role of polyploidy and chromosomal rearrangements as evolutionary drivers in alpine ecosystems.
Evolution of Asteraceae
Uncovering the genomic diversity of plants
To understand how plants have diversified, the underlying mechanisms that promote genomic-level changes and the evolutionary and ecological consequences of this over time.
Uncovering genomic diversity