Question: Have you always been interested with animals and plant genes?

Yvette Wilson answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Before I knew much about genes I was always interested in animals and plants. I became interested in genetics because how animals and plants survive, function and evolve depends on their genes and you can interpret much about their evolutionary history, their population sizes and likely environmental adaptations using genetic analyses. This has many applications especially in conservation biology. My current project working on lignin is quite different from what I have worked on before (mainly evolutionary biology), but I’m still finding it really interesting to try to identify exactly which genes control lignin synthesis and how they do this – this research is slightly more applied than my previous projects.