History of plants takes flight in the laboratory

摘要

WE can now identify many plants by examining their DNA 'fingerprint', and it follows that many new plant species are currently 'found' in the laboratory. These discoveries are still exciting, even though they lack the romance of the 18th and 19th century intrepid plant hunters who collected many previously unrecorded plants on their long treks into unknown territory. Even in the 21st century, however, there are places that have been poorly explored botan-ically, so field trips and expeditions are still mounted to find out more about regional floras.