Please tell us a little about your research and educational
background.
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“
I
use molecular phylogenies to infer relationships and the timing of
evolutionary change.
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I studied biology at the University of Hamburg, with a focus
on plant systematics and reproductive biology. The data for my
Ph.D. were gathered during two years in Manaus (Brazil), and
from there I moved to Washington, where I was a postdoc at the
Smithsonian in the Natural History Museum. After that I held
professorships at universities in Denmark (Aarhus), Germany
(Mainz), and the United States (University of Missouri-St.
Louis), and for the past four years, I've been a professor and
chair of systematic botany at the University of Munich. The best
thing about my current position is that I am also director of
the botanical garden of Munich (which has 100 employees) and the
Munich herbarium (which is among the top 20 worldwide in terms
of its size).
What do you consider the main focus of your research?
I am interested in the evolution of flowering plants,
especially their sexual systems. I use molecular phylogenies to
infer relationships and the timing of evolutionary change.
How has the field advanced since you first started in it?
DNA sequencing is the single biggest advance in my field.
Your most-cited paper in our database is the 2003 PNAS
article, "Horizontal gene transfer from flowering plants to
Gnetum." Would you please walk our readers through this
paper—its goals, methods, and findings?
My doctoral student Hyosig Won and I discovered a laterally
transferred piece of DNA when we compared phylogenies for the
conifer-like Gnetum derived from chloroplast,
mitochondrial, and nuclear sequences. There was one gene that
just would not give us the "right" phylogenetic relationships,
and when we blasted that gene's sequence in GenBank it turned
out to be extremely similar to a sequence of some higher
flowering plant. Our goals and methods were those of standard
molecular phylogenetics—the discovery was plain luck (followed
by some persistence in getting our manuscript published).
Where have you taken this work since the publication of the
PNAS paper?
One of my students is pursing the history of a particularly
mobile intron.
If you are free to talk about it, please tell us about your
current work.
Most of my ongoing work is on plant sexual systems, my old
love.
Susanne Renner, Ph.D.
Ludwig Maximilians University Munich
Munich, Germany
cites
:
ccording
to a recent analysis of 
