On a publication roll!

Rothfels Lab grads are on an American Journal of Botany publication roll! The January issue featured Mick’s article on a previously “undiscovered” gene in the chloroplast genome of ferns, and included the the publication of the transcriptome and chloroplast genome sequence of Adiantum shastense, the Shasta Maidenhair. You know, no biggie.

And today come the announcement that Forrest’s study of the continued evolutionary morphological simplification of Isoetes is available online! This result is super cool–showing that the pattern of morphological reduction for their once large tree-like ancestors is continuing in Isoetes. However, I have a particularly soft spot of the methods: this paper demonstrates the power of reversible jump MCMC and Bayesian model averaging (and irreversible models of character evolution) for studying processes of morphological evolution. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this type of approach!

Onwards and Upwards!

Today the Misher lab is hosting a teatime party to wish our friend and colleague GaHun Boo a warm farewell!

Gahun is heading back to his home country this weekend for a break before beginning his new adventure as a PostDoc Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris! His project title is “Mitochondrial genome diversity and biogeography of the red alga Gelidiella acerosa complex in tropical seas”.

The entire Rothfels Lab and Botany Crew wish you the best of luck!

Image by GaHun Boo

Carl is old!

Today we wish Carl a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! Thanks for bringing donuts guys!! 

The Rothfels Lab gets serious about dating

Cindy Looy, Nathalie Nagalingum, Michael Sundue, and I (Carl, in this case), are delighted that our grant proposal to apply “total evidence dating” (TED) methods to infer the timeline of vascular plant evolution has been (almost completely) approved! In lieu of embarrassing photos of the PIs, I’ll post here some of the figures from our application, to provide somewhat of a feel for what this project entails.