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3258 TAMU Office: Fax: 979-845-2891 |
Biography |
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Hugh Wilson joined the Department of Biology faculty at Texas A&M University in September of 1977. He is currently a Professor of Biology and Curator of the Department of Biology Herbarium. Hugh graduated from Alliance High School (Alliance, Ohio) in 1961. After four years of military service, including a year in Vietnam, he earned undergraduate and Masters degrees in Biology (1970/1972) from Kent State University, Kent, Ohio and received a Ph.D. in Plant Science at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1976. Hugh Wilson's work in Systematic Botany has centered in two areas; vascular plant floristics and crop plant evolution. Exemplified by The Vascular Flora of Madison County, Texas, a recent Botany M.S. thesis project of Texas A&M student Amanda Neill, foristic research defines the vascular flora of a given region. Emergence of the Internet as a medium for data flow has produced new potentials and interesting research problems with regard to both production and display of floristic information. Hugh's current work, in collaboration with several Texan botanical and computational centers, centers on development of the Digital Flora of Texas. Hugh teaches undergraduate courses in plant taxonomy and economic botany and a graduate level course in field systematic botany. |
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| Crop Plant Evolution and Systematics | |
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Work in my laboratory and the departmental herbarium deal with both biosystematic and floristic problems. Biosystematic studies employ comparative analysis of multiple data sets to define patterns of variation, resolve significant biotic units, and order those units according to evolutionary and structural relationships. While work in this area has involved many different plant groups at various taxonomic ranks, much of our effort has been directed species clusters that include domesticated and allied free-living elements of the genera Chenopodium and Cucurbita. Chenopodium includes the "Leafy Grains" of the high Andes (Chenopodium quinoa) and the central plateu of Mexico (C. berlandieri subsp. nuttalliae). Research centers on definition of intraspecific variation, phyletic linkage to wild types, and the dynamics of gene flow in populations that include both domesticated and free-living plants. A wild gourd native to Texas, Curcurbita texana, is closely related to the domesticated C. pepo (Acorn squash, Zucchini, Crookneck). There is, however, no general agreement as to its phyletic position (progenitor vs. feral derivative of the domesticate) and no generally accepted intraspecific classification system for C. pepo. Research with this group has involved basic isozyme genetics, assessment of weed/crop gene flow, analyses of morphogenetic variation, and crop/weed pollen competition. Research associated with the departmental herbarium relates to improving our understanding of the Texas flora, with emphasis on vascular plant taxa and habitats associated with the Post Oak Savannah of central Texas. This unit supports field-based M.S. projects that define county floras of central Texas. While work in this area involves fundamental floristic problems, the uCurrent research is also focused on bioinformatics and conversion of plant diversity information, as reflected by herbarium collections, to a form that is accessible to the WWW (World Wide Web). While this involves fundamental floristic problems, the primary focus is centered at the interface between systematic botany and computer science. Projects involve collaboration with the Texas A&M Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, Institute for Scientific Computation, and the S.M. Tracy Herbarium. This work is, in turn, linked to an emerging collaborative effort among Texas herbaria to computerize the state flora. |
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| Selected Publications | |
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Wilson, H.D., J. Doebley, and M. Duvall. 1992. Cloroplast DNA diversity among wild and cultivated members of Curcurbita (Curcurbitaceae). Theoretical and Applied Genetics 84:859-865. Wilson, H.D.. and J.R. Manhart. 1993. Crop weed gene flow: Chenopodium quinoa Willd. and C berlandieri Moq. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 86:642-648. Wilson, H.D., R. Lira, and I. Rodriguez. 1994. Crop/Weed Gene Flow: Curcurbita argyrosperma Huber and C. fraterna L.H. Bailey. Economic Botany 48: 293-300. Wilson, H.D., and J.S. Payne. 1994. Crop/Weed microgametophyte competition in Curcurbita pepo (Curcurbitaceae). American Journal of Botany 91: 1531-1537. Erich R. Schneider, John J. Leggett, Richard K. Furuta, Hugh D. Wilson, Stephan L. Hatch. Herbarium Specimen Browser: a tool for accessing botanical specimen collections. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (DL '98), June 23-26, 1998, Pittsburgh, PA. Wilson, H. D. 2001. Informatics: new media and paths of data flow. Taxon 50: 331-337. Wilson, H. D. 2001. Crop plant lineage pollution. British Food Journal 103(11): 780-784. |
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