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Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefense of Plants podcast, the official podcast of Indefensiveplants.com.

What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How's everyone doing this week?

Today we're talking about something extremely important in the plant world, the evolution and development

of fruits. Of course, many of us enjoy the taste of fruits every now and then or hopefully

incorporate them into at least portions of your diet, but the question becomes, how did they evolve? I think in many ways we take fruits

for granted as something that's always been, but that's not the case. And it's really interesting

to try to understand how that process got underway and how it's changed over time. Joining us to talk

about this is Dr. Cecilia Zumajo, who uses molecular techniques to try

to understand all of the processes involved in fruit development and evolution.

Now, a lot of her work focuses, of course, on angiosperms, specifically the model plant

Arabidopsis, which is a mustard, but it may surprise you how important gymnosperms

become in trying to understand

this process as well. By looking at different groups of gymnosperms, such as the ewes, the

ginkos, the needoms that produce fruit-like structures, Dr. Zamahou and her colleagues are trying

...