Aquatic flowering plants Potamogeton
Potamogeton is a genus of widespread aquatic flowering plants with more than 90 currently described species. Approximately half of Potamogeton species are tetraploid hybrids, many of which share the whole-genome hybridization. Potamogeton seems to have undergone radiating speciation after the genome duplication. This makes Potamogeton an attractive plant system to study lineage-specific changes triggered by the whole-genome duplication. With time duplicated genomes come back to the diploid state - a many million years-long process called genome re-diploidization. Simply by chance but also depending on the ecology of the species, this path will be different from lineage to lineage, which has been shown in the textbook example of salmonid fishes. In collaboration with Kaplan lab and Bobrov lab, we apply the genomics approach to study Potamogeton evolutionary history and lineage-specific re-diploidization in the context of environmental challenges. Photos and samples have been provided by Nikita Tikhomirov.