Le Min Choo

Le Min Choo is a PhD student with links to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Le Min is a botanist studying tropical plant evolution, hybridisation, and conservation, with a focus on legumes (plants of the bean family).

Le Min's PhD topic is on the phylogeny, biogeography, and the role of past and present hybridisation in understanding the evolution of the genus, Sindora, which is from the Detarioideae subfamily of the legume family. Sindora is a genus of subtropical and tropical rainforest trees found in Asia and Africa. Le Min uses DNA sequencing to study the evolution and diversity of these trees, and has plans to carry out fieldwork in the tropical rainforest of Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. The eventual aim of the project would be to find out if hybridisation events in the ancient past or recent present would affect how species diversity evolves in the tropical rainforest.