Leading expert on plant evolution and speciation and professor of Iowa State University, Jonathan Wendel, presented his research Thursday on cotton genomes and polyploidy in his presentation “Genes, Jeans, Genomes and the Wondrous Cycles of Polyploidy in Plants.” Wendel spoke in Birge hall as part of the Department of Botany’s Biology Colloquium.
Wendel’s research focuses on how plant genomes and phenotypes diversify with a special focus on whole genome duplication, or polyploidization. He has spent most of his career investigating the genetics, phylogenetics and phylogenomics of cotton, which may be economically and culturally the most important crop species on the planet, Wendel said.
Wendel said cotton come from more southern climates in the “New World,” as in North or South America.
“After Europeans enslaved Africans and made it economically feasible to grow cotton and further annualized it, it became the dominant plant in southern state and in the economy,” Wendel said. “Cotton has spread worldwide to become the most important fiber plant in the world today.”
In his presentation, Wendel showed maps of many different species of cotton that are used for making jeans, t-shirts, bedsheets and even a species that is used in the manufacturing of American money.
Humans have been interacting with cotton for thousands of years and engineering it, Wendel said. Wendel showed images of wild cotton, with short, brown and attached fiber that had been transformed by 5000 years of directional selections that transformed the plan into the one we know today with stronger, white and longer fibers.
Through his research, Wendel has specifically studied how each species of cotton has multiple sets of genomes and has also found that all plants in fact are polyploids, Wendel said.
Wendel said there are 144 genomes in a cotton plant and for a polyploid, an individual cell will have about 500,000 genes.
Wendel’s research has shown that genomic downsizing occurs following polyploids, where one genome will downsize while the other will grow larger in order to equilibrate, Wendel said.
“This raises the question, how is it that 1+1 doesn’t equal 2?” Wendel said.
This question is going to inspire research in some more higher order interaction, not just in single cells, Wendel said.