My research group documented an example of natural selection in the wild that was published in Science in June 2025. Here is a short video explaining our findings.
Category: Ash
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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 general public.
My Vice-Principal asked me to be more personal than usual in this inaugural, speaking about my Christian faith as well as my research as a biologist.
I decided to do this by placing side-by-side “tree-of-life” concepts from the Bible and from The Origin of Species. By comparing and contrasting the evidence for these very different trees of life, I tried to help the audience understand how I think through things as both a biologist and a Christian.
Whether or not this worked, you can judge for yourself.
The lecture drew on articles I have published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Nature Plants, and American Journal of Botany. I describe work by others in Nature and Nature Communications. The Origin of Species provided my starting point on Darwin’s tree of life simile. The works of Richard Dawkins, especially The Greatest Show on Earth and The God Delusion, provided helpful material in both sections of the lecture. On the Biblical tree of life, I used an argument by Peter J. Williams, (whose research recently featured in Nature) developed in his book Can We Trust the Gospels? I also refer to research by Elizabeth Barnes on inclusion in the biological sciences.
I have been a full professor at Queen Mary for over four years now, but there is a back-log of inaugural lectures, and many never happen at all. So it was a great privilege to be invited to give this.
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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, I cannot suggest shared evolutionary ancestry for these genes with those in ten other plants we compared ash to: coffee, grape, loblolly pine, monkey flower, poplar, tomato, Amborella, Arabidopsis, barrel medic, and bladderwort. This is despite the fact that monkey flower and bladderwort are in the same taxonomic order (Lamiales) as ash. (more…)
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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 impact of the disease that the Prime Minister had convened the emergency COBRA committee to discuss the government’s response. (more…)
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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 face ecological and economic disaster as one after another tree species succumb to imported diseases. (more…)