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The lost art of looking at plants

Advances in genomics and imaging are reviving a fading discipline.
  1. Heidi Ledford
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An Antirrhinum flower bud.

3D imaging offers new views of these antirrhinum (snapdragon) buds. Credit: Karen Lee/Xana Rebocho/John Innes Centre

When Elizabeth Kellogg finished her PhD in 1983, she feared that her skills were already obsolete. Kellogg studied plant morphology and systematics: scrutinizing the dazzling variety of plants’ physical forms to tease out how different species are related. But most of her colleagues had already pivoted to a new approach: molecular biology. “Every job suddenly required molecular techniques,” she says. “It was like I had learned how to make illuminated manuscripts, and then somebody invented the printing press.”

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Nature 553, 396-398 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-01075-5

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