Natural history collections provide an immense record of biodiversity on Earth. These
repositories have traditionally been used to address fundamental questions in …

Biological systems, from molecular complexes to whole organisms and ecological
interactions, tend to have a modular organization. Modules are sets of traits that are …

Integration and modularity refer to the patterns and processes of trait interaction and
independence. Both terms have complex histories with respect to both conceptualization …

An afternoon stroll through an English garden reveals the breathtaking beauty and
enormous diversity of flowering plants. The extreme variation of flower morphologies …

Nearly 100 genes and functional polymorphisms underlying natural variation in plant
development and physiology have been identified. In crop plants, these include genes …

Genetic architecture, the structure of the map** from genotype to phenotype, determines
the variational properties of the phenotype and is instrumental in understanding its …

Modularity has emerged as a central concept for evolutionary biology, thereby providing the
field with a theory of organismal structure and variation. This theory has reframed long …

Flowers come in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes. Despite this variety, flowers have a
very stereotypical architecture, consisting of a series of sterile organs surrounding the …

Background An increased understanding of leaf area development is important in a number
of fields: in food and non-food crops, for example short rotation forestry as a biofuels …

Size is an important parameter in the characterization of organ morphology and function. To
understand the mechanisms that control leaf size, we previously isolated a number of …