Mawalagedera SMUP, Callahan DL, Gaskett AC, Rønsted N, Symonds MRE (2019) Combining evolutionary inference and metabolomics to identify plants with medicinal potential. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7: 267 LINK
What’s the paper about?
This is a review paper looking at how phylogenetic comparative methods can be combined with advanced chemical analysis techniques such as molecular networking (which identifies functional similarities between chemical compounds) to identify new plant species that may have medicinal potential (the title kind of says all this really).
What’s the story behind it?
This was the first paper from Uday’s PhD thesis on phylogenetic approaches to medicinal potential in Australasian magnoliids. It’s always, I think, a nice idea to start off one’s thesis with a review paper like this, as it helps set the context for the rest of the thesis. Uday (and I) were really pleased that the reviewers of this paper very much liked it, and so it had a remarkably easy run in to the journal (I daren’t tell Uday that not all papers are like this!).
The Symonds Lab 
[…] To couple with the exciting news of Uday’s submission of her thesis, she’s also had accepted (and published – these online journals are very fast) the first paper, a review, from her thesis on combining metabolomics and phylogeny to predict medicinal potential in plants. The paper, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, can be read here, and you can find out a little more about it here. […]