Independent and Parallel Recruitment of Preexisting Mechanisms Underlying C4 Photosynthesis

Work conducted by Naomi Brown and others in Julian Hibberd's lab (including two former Part II students) is published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1201248). Naomi provided the first evidence that multiple genes important in the C4 pathway share a common regulatory mechanism. The work also shows that genes in phylogenetically distant C3 plants are primed to be recruited into the C4 pathway, and so offers major insight into the origins of the C4 pathway. When Naomi returns from maternity leave she will investigate the importance of these new findings on a recently funded grant by the BBSRC.