The lost art of looking at plants

Abstract

W hen 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 differ-ent species are related. But most of her colleagues had already pivoted to a new approach: molecular biology. " Every job sud-denly required molecular techniques, " she says. " It was like I had learned how to make illuminated manuscripts, and then somebody invented the printing press. " Kellogg had graduated near the start of a revolution in plant biology. Over the next few decades, as researchers adopted molecular tools and DNA sequencing, detailed analyses of plants' physical traits fell out of fashion. And because many geneticists worked with only a few key organisms, such as the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana, they didn't need expertise in comparing and contrasting different plant species. At universities, botany departments folded and molecular-biology © 2 0 1 8 M a c m i l l a n P u b l i s h e r s L i m i t e d , p a r t o f S p r i n g e r N a t u r e . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .