In this book, the first of its kind, many of the world's foremost exponents of plant evolutionary-developmental genetics ('evo-devo') give cutting-edge accounts of the scientific revolution that is currently transforming our fundamental understanding of the remarkable diversity of sizes, shapes, form and colour encompassed by terrestrial plants.
Combining rapidly accumulating information from the current molecular genetic revolution with insights from the longer established but now revitalised disciplines of plant morphology, systematics and ecology, they show how we are finally gaining the ability to trace major transitions in plant form back through their developmental expression to the minute changes in DNA sequences of individual genes that are the raw material of evolution.
1. Perspectives and paradigms in plant evo-devo
2. Impact of transposons on plant genomes
3. Evolutionary developmental biology: impact on systematic theory and practice,and the contribution of systematics
4. Transference of function,heterotopy and the evolution of plant
development
5. Are macroevolution and microevolution qualitatively different?
Evidence from Poaceae and other families
6. The Mostly Male theory of flower origins: summary and update regarding the Jurassic pteridosperm Pteroma
7. Generating and filtering major phenotypic novelties: neoGoldschmidtian saltation revisited
8. Evolution of adaptive petal call morphology
9. How the land plants learned their floral ABC:the role of MADS-box genes in the evolutionary origin of flowers
10. Orchid flowers: evolution and molecular development
etc.