Welcome to the Cronk laboratory
at the Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia
Research on the evolution and development of plants
Evolutionary developmental biology, floral biology, adaptation genomics
Our lab integrates comparative genomics, molecular developmental biology and evolutionary biology to study plant form. We are interested in the how different morphologies evolve in plants, as well as the functional significance of morphological differences between species.
Our main model organisms for this include the Leguminosae (floral morphology) and black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa (adaptive evolution of trees). Next generation sequencing of whole genomes and transcriptomes is an important part of our work. Our institute runs an Illumina Hi-Seq 2000, which currently generates 600Gb of sequence per run (note: the Arabidopsis genome is 0.16Gb).
