Dr Freek Bakker holding one of our Pelargonium specimens from Turkey.
It was a great pleasure to catch up with Freek Bakker of Wageningen University today. Freek spent 5 years working with me and Mary Gibby on the NERC funded Taxonomy Initiative in the 1990s/2000s and contributed to a string of papers on Pelargonium systematics, some very early molecular biogeography and phylogeny dating as well as papers bringing together data from three genomic compartments (Nuclear, plastid and mitochindrial). Freek is now busy with next generation sequencing and has been using 454 and illumina approaches to study DNA from a wide range of herbarium specimens.
He delivered at talk at the Linnean society earlier this week and was kind enough to repeat the talk for interested PhD students at Reading today.
