Page 38 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018
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The evolution of plant species Yves van de Peer, CMEG and the VIB Centre for Plant Systems Biology, University of Gent
Understanding plant genomes, through genome sequencing and analysis, is critical for many aspects of the agricultural sciences, particularly for plant breeding and crop improvement, and in understanding the evolution of plants and how they respond to environmental stresses.
with Optical Mapping information. His contribution to the genome sequencing of important plant species, including ferns (Nature Plants), charophytic algae (Cell), the gnetophytes (a small group of exotic plants which includes the enigmatic Welwitschia mirabilis) (Nature Plants), and members of the tree family Populus (PNAS), is evidence of his extensive contribution to science.
One of his recent studies, published in GigaScience with a large collaborative team of Chinese researchers from the Beijing Genome Institute, involved the sequencing, assembly and functional interpretation of the genomes of
five important African orphan crop species: Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea), Lablab bean (Lablab purpureus), White acacia (Faidherbia albida), Marula (Sclerocarya birrea), and Drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera). These are all economically important food and feed species on the African continent. The genome sequence data will be useful to identify agronomically important genes and to understand their modes of action, and can facilitate future breeding strategies
to enhance the performance and resistance of these regional crops.
Yves’ interest in gnetophytes led him to join Don Cowan on a short field expedition to the Namib Desert, where he had a chance to see the Welwitschias first-hand, sit on the top of a sand dune to watch
the rising sun (which was invisible due to heavy fog), and be photographed at the Tropic of Capricorn.
Yves van de Peer is a part-time professor in the Department
of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, a member of the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics and an NRF A1-rated researcher.
He collaborates extensively with UP academic staff, including Professors Don Cowan and Zander Myburg, and emerging researchers Dr Thulani Makhalanyane and Associate Professor Esh Mizrachi.
When not at UP, Professor Van de Peer leads the Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Genomics division at the VIB Centre for Plant Systems Biology, University of Ghent, Belgium.
With his research focussing on the evolution of plants, their adaptation to stress conditions and the the role of genome duplication, Yves and his research team have had a particularly productive year in 2018, with 22 published papers, many in the world’s leading Plant Science journals.
Among his collection of high-impact publications in 2018, several stand out. The provocatively titled comment ‘Size does matter’, published in Nature Plants, is a critical analysis of the evolution of Next Generation Sequencing technologies in plant chromosome assemblies, and the latest advances in combining long- read Nanopore Sequence data
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