As a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, Mike Axtell would often come into the lab carrying bits of plants he had clipped from bushes by the sides of the busy roads. He would dump them on his desk and begin to prepare them for microRNA sequencing, hoping to determine whether microRNAs were active throughout plant evolution. Most people would have ordered the plant samples from a catalog, says Graham Ruby, then a grad student in David Bartel's lab, where the two worked. "It was really amusing to see how far he was able to get with things people planted in an urban setting," says Ruby.
Axtell became interested in plants as an undergraduate at Ithaca College in New York. To him, plants simply seemed like a nonmessy way of studying genetics. "Plants are so easy to manipulate," says Axtell. For graduate work, he picked ...
