2 quotes from this excellent review: "but RGL (reciprocal gene loss) has not yet been documented on a whole-genome scale in plants. In view of the numerous WGDs that have occurred during angiosperm evolution, the inevitable RGLs that can be inferred to have happened afterwards must be considered as prime suspects for agents of plant speciation. Hard evidence implicating RGLs as a cause of speciation is, however, still lacking in both plants and fishes, in contrast to /Drosophila." /"The plant kingdom is the uncontested big kahuna of polyploidization, but simpler non-plant systems still offer many lessons that can help us understand the waves of successive WGDs that have washed over angiosperm evolution." In conclusion: - some interesting objectives for future research can be distilled from this paper (Seb captures some of these nicely in his IWT project!). Concerning RGL, the Scannell/Wolfe papers in Nature/GR are pioneering. - we should be cautious about providing all our plant comparative genomics data to the community (i.e. we /first /should try to extract the nice biological stories before releasing the data). Or in other words: Ken has already proven to be extremely aware & fast ;-) best, Klaas PS. Sorry for cross-posting -- ================================================================== Klaas Vandepoele, PhD Tel. 32 (0)9 33 13822 VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology, Ghent University Technologiepark 927, 9052 Gent, Belgium E-mail: Klaas.Vandepoele@psb.ugent.be Website: http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/ ==================================================================