Bill Baker

speaker

149 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Bill Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

In Our Time · The Evolution of Trees · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

is effectively the changes in DNA that accumulate over time.

All of us ourselves have DNA.

That is what encodes our properties and functions.

And over time, DNA mutates.

Now, if you can pull together DNA code, DNA sequence as we call it, from different species but for the same parts of the genome and line those up,

you're able to run it through a complex algorithm and infer a tree or recover a tree.

We often talk about recovering as if it's a form of excavation, almost.

We know that there is a tree out there, but that we have to somehow get to it through our molecular genetic shenanigans.

I mean, building the tree of life is a huge global endeavour.

There are many, many researchers involved in this, and at Kew it's been our bread and butter for decades.

For the last decade, I've led a programme called the Plant and Fungal Trees Programme at Kew, and we have recently, it sounds rather glib, we have recently completed the flowering plant tree of life, by which I mean we have sequenced one representative of every genus of flowering plant.

Now, the flowering plants make up...

90% of the plants that grow on Earth today, Chris has not talked about flowering plants yet.

He's talked about things that come long before flowering plants, but there are 350,000 of them.

We've sequenced about 90% of the genera.

That represents about 98% of the total diversity.

And we've done that using Q's amazing collections and research.

really novel genomic methods.

And I think the thing we're most proud about is that everything that we have done is in the public domain and free for other people to use.

And it's been a really wonderful springboard for other people's research.

Showing 21–40 of 149 · page 2 of 8