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How can we identify plants?

Plants are essential for many aspects of our daily lives as they provide food, medicines, and construction materials. However, plants can also cause harm, think of poisonous plants, pollen allergies, adulterants in herbal medicines, or invasive species. Correct identification of plants is therefore crucial but unfortunately this is often problematic. Plant.ID will address this issue by developing state-of-the-art molecular solutions for a simplified way of identifying plants.

Latest news

  • Maria and Physilia both present at a recent digital BRC16/19 SAMBA conference hosted from Brazil Sep. 16, 2021

    Last week both Maria and Physilia presented their research at a conference organized by the Brazilian Research Consortium (BRC) that was digitally hosted by UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PARÁ. Physilia gave her latest results on how the study of poop has helped her to understand the capercaille diet, while Maria gave an update on her working using soil eDNA to study the impact of climate change on vegetation in a boreal temperate forest.

  • Summer break update Aug. 18, 2021
    Research has continued in the Plant.ID network over the summer, and many congratulations must be given to Physilia and Marcel and their supervisors for the two published papers and preprint that have been published over the last couple of months. Physilia first publication in Environmental DNA presents the firstlarge-scale molecular dietary study ever on capercailles with 30% of their diet retrieved, with important implications for conservationists. Her other recent preprint in bioRxiv contributes towards the development of 'extended barcodes' for plant identification using environmental DNA. In addition, Marcel and his colleagues published a paper in Quaternary Science Reviews analyzing the mammoth (and other megafauna) diets. These are outstanding achievements for our PhD fellows as they complete their PhDs and move on to next stages in their research careers.
  • And another - Ntwai publishes his first paper. June 25, 2021
    The papers have been rolling out this month - congratulations to Ntwai and Bengt for their publication in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution! This is Ntwai's first paper from his PhD. Here he explores the Biogeographic origins of southern African Silene (Caryophyllaceae).

Research output