Professor Enrico Coen: DNA Stories: What plants, genes and genomes tell us about evolution
Professor Enrico Coen, John Innes Centre, Norwich
Lecture Theatre, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh
BSS AGM follows this lecture!
Date: Thursday 21 May, 2026 Edinburgh, from 6:00-7:00pm – (Tea/coffee and biscuits will be available from 5:30 pm as usual)
Venue: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Science Building, 20a Inverleith Row, EH3 5LR
Venue Note: To access the lecture please enter via the Science Buildings main reception, 20A Inverleith Row, Edinburgh EH3 5LR. Note this is NOT the public entrance to the gardens. what3words ///ROPES.DINNER.CLUBS
Title: DNA Stories: What plants, genes and genomes tell us about evolution
Abstract: Whole genome sequences have become the gold standard of evolutionary biology, superseding classical taxonomy in defining species relationships and history. That perspective rests on the assumption that the genome behaves as a single coherent entity, with a single story to tell. I shall explore this idea through our recent studies on variation in wild populations of the Snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus. Through a combination of genetics, phenotypic analysis and population genomics we will see that different genes have different stories to tell, giving us a much richer and nuanced picture of evolution than we might have imagined.
BIO: Enrico Coen was born in Liverpool in 1957 and obtained a PhD in molecular genetics at Cambridge University in 1982. After a postdoc at Cambridge, he moved to the John Innes Centre, Norwich in 1984 where he began using Antirrhinum as a model system to study plant development and evolution. Based on the results of an extensive mutational screen, he proposed that the ground plan of a flower depends on the combinatorial action of genes acting along the radial and dorsoventral axes of the flower. More recently, he has been using a combination of imaging and computational modelling to bridge the gaps between gene action, cell biology, development and evolution. In addition to publishing in scientific journals, he communicates science to a broad audience through articles in popular journals and in his books The Art of Genes and Cells to Civilizations, where he explores connections between science and art. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
