Monocotyledons comprise around 56,000 flowering plants, contained within various divergent lineages.The true grasses,Poaceaeare the most economically important monocotyledons (including grains, sugar canes and bamboo), and have a morphologically distinct form of inflorescence, 1-40 flowers which are collected into evolutionarily novel structures known as grass spikelets.

InEvoDevolast week, new research published byChristensen and Malcomberuses a combination of Bayesian phylogenetics, expression analyses, molecular evolutionary analyses, and Maximum parsimony and Maximum likelihood character reconstruction methods to investigate the evolutionary history of developmental genes associated with spikelet formation. They explore both the timing of the evolutionary event which produced paralogs between lineages, and the supporting evidence for how genetic alterations lead to subfunctionalization and/or neofunctionalization in the two lineages studied.

Gene expression analysis shows a complex pattern of evolution associated with spikelet development, which Christensen and Malcomber discuss in detail. How this translates to a morphological context is yet to be determined, and several areas for further research are suggested by the authors in order to expand on their results.