Profile: Douglas and Pamela Soltis: The Power of Two

Science 6 August 2010: Vol. 329. no. 5992, pp. 623 - 625 DOI: 10.1126/science.329.5992.62

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Profile: Douglas and Pamela Soltis:

The Power of Two

Elizabeth Pennisi

A University of Florida couple studying the evolution of flowering plants shows the value of doubled genomes—and joined careers.

Married, with plants. Douglas and Pamela Soltis work together in all aspects of their careers. CREDIT: E. PENNISI/SCIENCE [Larger version of this image]

PULLMAN, WASHINGTON—When Pamela Soltis first joined her husband, Douglas, on the faculty at Washington State University, Pullman, they wrote separate grants and ran separate research programs. But they worked side by side in the field and in the greenhouse and read and critiqued each other's grant proposals and papers. More often than not, they also worked together in the lab. "We knew we were interested in a lot of the same things," Pam recalls. Eventually, they gave up trying to work independently.

Today, more than 25 years later, they are known collectively as the "Solti." "We're generally viewed as one person," Pam says. True, they have separate appointments at the University of Florida, Gainesville, she at the natural history museum and he in the biology department. But students, grants, courses, publications, talks, even accolades are shared. They studied in London on the same Fulbright scholarship and were co-awardees on an international prize. "Everything they do, they do together," says Michael Donoghue, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University.

"They are the most powerful, productive couple that may have ever been in botany, certainly in my generation," says John Kress, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The Soltises helped bring plant systematics into the molecular age, according to peers. And their innovations have led to firsts in "approaches to questions and ultimately first answers to questions," says Vaughan Symonds, a former postdoc now at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Early adopters of new techniques—including molecular DNA tools—as students in the 1980s, the Soltises have shown how rapid progress can be when two minds focus on a single research program. Says Jeffrey Doyle, a systematist at Cornell University, "They are so energetic and active that seeing Doug and Pam moving into your areas is a little frightening."
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Dechronization Interviews Jack Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Systematic Biology

En el blog "Dechronization" se ha publicado una entrevista muy interesante a Jack Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief de Systematic Biology.

Esta es la primera pregunta (y la respuesta):

Question: What are the most exciting recent developments in systematics?

I think there are three. First, there are second-order statistical analyses that can now be applied across a sample of trees from a Bayesian posterior distribution. These include biogeography, comparative methods, and macroevolutionary tests. We used to have to rely on a single tree for our analyses; now we can do the same analyses accounting for phylogenetic uncertainty by sampling from the posterior distribution of trees.

Second, the explicit accommodation of incongruence in analyses of multilocus data through the use of the coalescent. I think it will be really cool when we can use these approaches to differentiate between incongruence caused by coalescent stochasticity from that caused by nonvertical transmission such as horizontal gene transfer or hybridization.

Third, the development of phylogenomics. I remember a symposium debate at the Evolution meetings when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s. The debate was about total evidence approaches versus other methods. During the debate, someone raised the question of, “If we could sequence every single nucleotide in the genome, would we then get the best possible estimate of the phylogeny?” I think that emerging datasets demonstrate that the answer to this question might be, “not necessarily.”

Les recomiendo leer la entrevista completa en:
http://treethinkers.blogspot.com/2009/04/dechronization-interviews-jack-sullivan.html