The National Science Foundation awarded Dr. Mark Fishbein, associate professor of Plant Biology, Ecology, and Evolution at Oklahoma State University and director of the University Herbarium, a three-year grant totaling $642,000 to study the evolution of milkweed, a species crucial to the rapidly declining monarch butterfly population, using genome sequences. In previous research, Fishbein has investigated the evolution of milkweed defenses in response to monarch feeding. However, the evolutionary relationships among milkweed species are still not well understood.