Home / People / Faculty and Scientists / Quentin Cronk
Quentin C.B. Cronk
Academic History
- University of British Columbia Professor of Plant Science and former Director, UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research
- Reader in Vascular Plant Systematics at Edinburgh University and RBGE 1999-2002
- Faculty member, Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology (ICMB) Edinburgh University and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 1995-2002
- Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria, 1994-95
- Departmental Lecturer in Botany, University of Oxford, 1992-95
- Fellow and Tutor for Admissions, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1989-92
- Lecturer in Botany, Trinity College, Dublin, 1988-89
- Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1985-88
- PhD Department of Botany, University of Cambridge, 1985
Quentin Cronk's Recent Papers (as indexed by PubMed)
Please note: Additional publications not indexed by PubMed are displayed here (please scroll down)
Botany without borders: barcoding in focus.
Mol Ecol. 2008 Dec;17(24):5175-6
Authors: Kane NC, Cronk Q
This recent meeting, held on the campus of the University of British Columbia, attracted 1200 delegates and a vast array of talks, but was notable for a remarkable showing of talks and posters on DNA barcoding in plants, spread through many sessions. The Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding defines barcoding as 'species identification and discovery through the analysis of short, standardized gene regions known as DNA barcodes'. This approach is somewhat controversial in animals (Rubinoff et al., 2006), although it has been shown to be useful and reliable in many metazoan taxa (Meyer & Paulay 2005; Hajibabaei et al., 2007), in which the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene is used. However, in land plants, COI evolves far too slowly to be useful, and there is no obvious single universal alternative (Fazekas et al., 2008).Genes that work well in one taxon may perform poorly in other taxa. Additionally, some perfectly good plant species,reproductively isolated and morphologically and ecologically distinct, are too young to show much sequence divergence at most loci. Nevertheless, as we saw at this conference, progress has been made towards identifying genes that serve many of the functions of DNA barcodes, at least in some plant taxa.
PMID: 19067801 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Link to abstract on PubMed: Botany without borders: barcoding in focus.
Books
- Quentin Cronk, Richard Bateman and Julie A Hawkins (Eds)(2002)
Developmental Genetics and Plant Evolution
564 pages, 100 b\w illus., 19 tabs. Taylor and Francis, UK; Garland, USA. - Quentin Cronk (2000)
The Endemic Flora of St Helena.
119 pages, 25 col. plates, b/w photos. Anthony Nelson, UK. - Quentin CB Cronk and Janice L Fuller (2001)
Plant Invaders: The Threat to Natural Ecosystems.
241 pages, b/w photos, illus., tabs, maps. Earthscan, UK. (2nd edition, 1st edition 1995).
