Mitchell-Olds Lab

Among the experimental systems in biology, plants provide the best opportunity to study the interaction between genetic and environmental variation, which produces the complex traits observed in nature. Our research is focused on Evolutionary and Ecological Functional Genomics, at the interface between natural genetic variation, molecular function, and the environmental context in which plants grow. We seek a mechanistic understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes in populations in order to test hypotheses in evolutionary ecology, and to understand the causes and consequences of complex trait variation of plants in field environments.


Main	Flowering Time	Drought Tolerance	Herbivory	Speciation	Apomixis	Evolutionary Biochemistry	Sub-Saharan Africa
Research
Among the experimental systems in biology, plants provide the best opportunity to study the interaction between genetic and environmental variation, which produces the complex traits observed in nature. Our research is focused on Evolutionary and Ecological Functional Genomics, at the interface between natural genetic variation, molecular function, and the environmental context in which plants grow. We seek a mechanistic understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes in populations in order to test hypotheses in evolutionary ecology, and to understand the causes and consequences of complex trait variation of plants in field environments.