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Michael Purugganan, Silver Professor of Biology at New York University Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, will present a talk focusing on plant evolutionary genomics, especially the evolutionary genomics of crops.

Domesticated species are a cornerstone of modern human civilization, providing the food resources for human societies. Domesticated crops are also a model to understand the nature of evolution, a point made by Darwin who noted that “a careful study of domesticated animals and cultivated plants would offer the best chance of making out this obscure problem”. Using food species as diverse as rice and date palm, we will explore recent work on domesticated crops that combine genomics, archaeology and evolutionary biology, and our changing understanding of how domestication occurs, how crop species evolve, and indeed about how evolution proceeds.