Category: Ash

  • Public lecture “Trees of Life: Do they exist?”

    Public lecture “Trees of Life: Do they exist?”

    In gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London on 16th November 2022, the film of which can be viewed below. Inaugural lectures are a chance to give a personal view on one’s research field, at a level that will be understood by the whole university and the […]

  • The evolutionary mystery of orphan genes

    Every newly sequenced genome contains genes with no traceable evolutionary descent – the ash genome was no exception This week in Nature I and my co-authors published the ash tree genome. Within it we found 38,852 protein-coding genes. Of these one quarter (9,604) were unique to ash. On the basis of our research so far, […]

  • Ash tree genomics in response to ash dieback

    The ash tree genome project published in Nature today began, for me, with a lunchtime conversation with Andrew Leitch in the SCR bar at Queen Mary University of London in early November 2012. Ash dieback had been found in natural woodland in England for in late October. Such was the seriousness of the likely environmental […]

  • Telegraph article: British woodlands need diversity from around the world

    This article was written for The Daily Telegraph and is published online here. Foreign tree species are needed to help preserve Britain’s woodlands from disease, argues Dr Richard Buggs. Trees in Britain do not have enough genetic diversity to cope with a global influx of pathogens. As global trade introduces new pests and diseases, we […]