Rosemary Carpenter

Rosemary Carpenter is a British plant geneticist known for her work on members of the genus Antirrhinum, commonly known as a snapdragon, for which she and Enrico Coen were awarded the 2004 Darwin Medal by the Royal Society.

[1] Starting in the 1960, Carpenter worked with Brian Harrison at the John Innes Centre on unstable mutants of the snapdragon Antirrhinum.

[2] After meeting Carpenter during an interview at the John Innes Centre in 1983, Enrico Coen joined the center and they began a long collaboration with him using snapdragons as a model system to understand jumping genes and evolution.

[3][2] They applied a combination of molecular, genetic and morphological approaches to snapdragons with the goal of elucidating patterns in flower development[4] using the hundreds of Antirrhihum mutants established by Carpenter.

[15][16][17] These genetic investigations allowed them to define the patterns of color,[18][19] shape,[20][21][22] and floral asymmetry[23][24] in snapdragons and other plants.