About
The Edwards Lab is in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.
We are botanists and evolutionary biologists. We are inspired by the diverse ways in which plants look and act, and want to understand how this diversity has evolved. Phylogeny is at the heart of everything we do, and we are committed to the development of model clades for studying evolution. We also always try to think as integratively as possible, and keep the whole organism in mind as we dive into minutia. Currently we are focused on a couple of different lineages and questions.
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Portullugo
The "Portullugo" is a clade of ~2200 species that live in a wide variety of habitats and are found on every continent, though they have a penchant for deserts and the high alpine (lucky us). The lineage includes well known groups such as the cacti, and less famous but equally wonderful plants like the Molluginaceae, the purslanes, lewisias, and the Didiereaceae.
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C4 and CAM evolutionary trajectories
We are especially interested in how C4 and CAM photosynthesis, two fairly complicated plant adaptations to low CO2, hot temperatures, and drought, have evolved so many times (~100s), mostly over the past 15 or so million years. We have worked on the C4 problem in grasses and are currently focusing our attention on C4 and CAM origins in the Portullugo, a lineage that holds a suprising number of both C4 and CAM plants.
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Viburnum
Viburnum is a clade of ~165 species of woody shrubs and trees common in northern hemisphere forests, but they are also found in tropical Asia and montane forests throughout Central and South America. We are currently focused on using this lineage to study the evolution of leaf form and function, and in tropical-temperate biome transitions, but in reality we are pretty interested in every single thing about Viburnum.
