Mark Johnston, Dalhousie University
Biology
Professor
Halifax, Nova Scotia
mark.johnston@dal.ca
Office:
(902) 494-8005
Bio/Research
I am interested generally in the forces that shape the evolution of plants, and more specifically in plant reproduction. Unlike most animals, the vast majority of plant individuals possess both female and male sexual organs. This raises a number of interesting issues: How much should an individua...
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Bio/Research
I am interested generally in the forces that shape the evolution of plants, and more specifically in plant reproduction. Unlike most animals, the vast majority of plant individuals possess both female and male sexual organs. This raises a number of interesting issues: How much should an individual self-fertilize? Does self-fertilization cause populations to go extinct? In addition to their use in addressing these kinds of questions, plants are also very useful for addressing other issues of fundamental importance to evolutionary biology, not just plant evolutionary biology. Such topics include: the rate of appearance of new, harmful mutations; the effect of continued inbreeding on fitness; differences in rates of evolution between genes transmitted maternally vs. paternally; etc., etc.
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