This morning, Laetitia Carrive brillantly defended her master's thesis in Paris. Her master's project focussed on the evolution of the perianth in Magnoliidae, combining detailed morphological observations with micro-CT scanning on selected species (in collaboration with Jürg Schönenberger and Yannick Staedler at the University of Vienna) and phylogenetic comparative analyses using state-of-the-art approaches (incl. reversible-jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo) to characterize trait evolution and correlation. Her main result is that perianth phyllotaxy and fusion appear to be correlated in Magnoliidae.

Today, Jan Perret, a second-year student at Université Paris-Sud, starts an internship with us on the flora of our campus. He will document the morphology of selected species in both the PROTEUS database and the Xper3 software and generate a first computerized identification tool for the flora of the campus.

This week, Hervé and Elisabeth will attend the Evolutionary Plant Radiations Meeting at the University of Zurich, a very exciting opportunity to meet many of the botanists and method developers currently active in the field. Elisabeth will present her latest results on the evolution of floral symmetry across angiosperms (as part of her PhD research) and Hervé will present the first formal results from the large collaborative eFLOWER project.