Jeans, Genes, and Genomes: Exploring the Mysteries of Cotton

Jonathan F. Wendel is professor and chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology at Iowa State. His research focuses on mechanisms by which flowering plant genomes and phenotypes diversify, with a special focus on the phenomenon of genome doubling, or polyploidy. Much of his work centers on cotton, in which two diploid and two polyploid species were each independently domesticated thousands of years ago. Cotton thus provides a model framework for exploring the origin of form and diversity in nature, human domestication, and the evolutionary consequences of genome doubling. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Lecture Series.