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| Name |
Soltis, Douglas E. |
| Location
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University of Florida |
| Primary Field
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Plant Biology |
| Secondary Field
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Evolutionary Biology |
 Election Citation
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Soltis is a world leader in angiosperm evolution, including phylogeny reconstruction, floral developmental genetics, and phylogeography. He provided a modern synthesis of angiosperm evolution and helped build the first comprehensive tree of life positioning Amborella as a sister group to the angiosperms. He developed Amborella as an evolutionary reference genome. |
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Research Interests
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Douglas Soltis' laboratory has diverse research interests in plant biology and evolution. He studies plant evolution using DNA approaches; interests include building the tree of life for all organisms, flowering plant evolution, genome doubling (polyploidy), and conservation genetics. Soltis has reconstructed relationships among all major lineages of flowering plants. With other researchers he has proposed a new classification for angiosperms. He is working with colleagues to build the tree of life of China. At a larger scale, Soltis is part of a group that built the first-draft tree of life for all of the 2.3 million named species on Earth. He and others revealed that Amborella is sister to all other living angiosperms (the duck-billed platypus of flowering plants) and helped lead the effort to provide the complete genome sequence of Amborella as a reference genome for flowering plants. Soltis and collaborators also revealed that numerous ancient polyploidy events have occurred throughout angiosperm history. He has also developed the sunflowering genus Tragopogon as a model for the study of recent and recurrent genome doubling, revealing the rapid and dynamic nature of polyploid evolution. |
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