Just catching up with the literature and noticing that massive research effort by my @KewScience colleagues on the Plant and Fungal Tree of Life Project (PAFTOL) has revealed an Angiosperm353 tree with major differences to the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG IV) tree 🧵(1/9) For example, Solanales, Aquifoliales, Bruniales and Icacinales are polyphyletic in the new Angioserm353 tree, and a big polytomy has disappeared (2/9)

Using genomic prediction to accelerate tree breeding has been pioneered by Dario Grattapaglia. Here he looks back on 12 years of progress. Initially, marker assisted breeding was overhyped...🧵(1/5) mdpi.com/1999-4907/13/1… but now - with a far more polygenic understanding of traits and reduced cost of sequencing - genomic prediction has come of age. It "will soon become the most efficient and effective way to carry out advanced tree breeding" he argues. (2/5)

A fascinating essay on the neo-Darwinian synthesis was published last month in PNAS by Nick Barton @ISTAustria, one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of our time. He reflects on some great unsolved problems in evolutionary biology... 🧵(1/n) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2… ...and the extent to which they can be solved by the idea that biological function is spread throughout the whole genome. He argues that natural selection is most effective when it acts on "a miasma of slight variants" rather than on single genes of large effect (2/n)