Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Evan S. Forsythe

Evan S. Forsythe, first author of Genome-wide signatures of plastid-nuclear coevolution point to repeated perturbations of plastid proteostasis systems across angiosperms

Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Colorado State University

Education: PhD, University of Arizona, School of Plant Sciences

Non-scientific Interests: I spend a lot of time outdoors fly fishing, skiing, rafting, biking, and backpacking. I am also involved in local community/social justice causes and I sing in an indie rock band (but I have no plans of quitting my day job).

Brief bio: I earned my PhD with Mark Beilstein and I am currently a postdoc in Dan Sloan’s lab. My work in both labs has been centered on using phylogenomics as a tool to understand cell and molecular biology. This includes understanding how gene duplication contributes to functional genomic repertoires and understanding the functional constraints at play during hybridization and introgression. Our recent work published in Plant Cell is a good example; we used phylogenomics to detect widespread signatures of plastid-nuclear coevolution and genetic interaction, including for nuclear genes not previously known to interact with the plastid. I plan to further study the evolutionary mechanisms underlying these signatures of plastid-nuclear coevolution.