Hey, That Could Have Been My Genome!

I've told you before that I once dreamt of becoming a conservation geneticist. I major turning point for me occurred after I had completed rotations during my first year of grad school. I had to decide between two different labs: in one I would use molecular markers to study the demography of a species of tree and in the other I would study the evolution of Drosophila genomes. I chose the Drosophila lab (for reasons I won't get into here or now), and the rest was history.

It turns out I could have been a coauthor on a Science paper if I had chosen the tree lab. My potential advisor in that lab contributed to the recently published poplar genome (AP story here). This project is being heralded as the first genome sequence from a tree, although "tree" is a paraphyletic classification. I can't stand paraphyletic taxa, so you can probably guess what I think about those claims. Anyway, there is no guarantee that I would have worked on that particular project, although I may have ended up studying poplar population genetics (say that ten times fast). Even though I don't have any Science papers under my belt, I don't feel too bad missing out on the poplar genome project.