The Yang Lab seeks to understand the patterns and drivers of plant diversity.

We combine field and collection-based approaches with phylogenetics, transcriptomics and genomics to reconstruct species relationships and to study polyploidy, reticulate evolution, and gene families involved in pigmentation, plant carnivory, and stress tolerance. 

Lab News
  • Jul 2018: The lab had a wonderful time at the Botany meeting held in Rochester, MN with three talks (Mohn, Morales, and Yang) and one poster presentation (Chen).
  • Jul 2018: Rebekah Mohn had a busy summer. She collected Drosera in MT and ID right after finishing her OTS Tropical Plant Systematics course in Costa Rica. 
  • Jun 2018: Diego Morales and Lingyun Chen presented their work at the Society of Systematic Biologists meeting in Columbus OH.
  • Jun 2018: Rebekah Mohn won two awards from the Botanical Society of America: the Triarch Botanical Images Travel Award and the Karling Award that supports the best graduate student research proposal. Congrats again!
  • May 2018: Rebekah Mohn won the American Society of Plant Taxonomists' t-shirt contest with a beautiful drawing of the twinflower (Linnaea borealis). She also won the Bell Museum Natural History Awards to support her summer field research. With that she just finished a week-long trip collecting Drosera in the east coast. Congratulations!
  • Mar 2018: Rebekah Mohn visited University of Michigan over the spring break to work with Stephen Smith on niche evolution in Drosera and participated in the Early Career Scientists Symposium. 
  • Jan 2018: Lab manager Yinyin Huang is accepted by her dream PharmD program at University of Minnesota, starting Fall 2018. Congratulations!
  • Oct 2017: First lab trip! Missouri Botanical Garden Fall Symposium​​