On the entirely coincidental date of 4.20, Mick passed his quals! And with flying colours, by all accounts. Thanks to Ben, Brent, Britt, and Cindy for being on his committee, and to Carrie for organizing the celebrations. And congratulations to Mick!!!
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!
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.
In which Carl goes to actual NorCal (or is it NoCal?) to spread the fern gospel with the North Coast Chapter of the CNPS (California Native Plants Society). A great time was had by all, or at least by Carl (thanks to Carol Ralph!).
And finally, vertebrates put on a pretty good show too, including this spectacular 8-inch or so beauty: Dicramptodon tenebrosus. It was just sitting there at Patrick’s Point!
Ben Dauphin, Rothfels Lab ’15-’16, crushed his thesis defense at the University of Neuchâtel — congratulations Ben!!
Ben’s defense, and the generousity of Jason and Michael, provided me with my first trip to Switzerland. The weather was gorgeous, the people were outstanding, even the ferns represented.
The 19th International Botanical Congress, IBC 2017, was held from July 23 to 29. And a spectacle it was! Shenzhen pulled out all the stops–Olympics-style opening ceremonies complete with dancing children, huge living walls, the sides of skyscrapers lit up, free metro passage for everyone, airport style security to enter the building …. you name it! I’m not sure exactly how many people were there–the estimates I saw were around 6 to 7 thousand–but it was a lot. And great to meet old friends, make new ones, and see a lot of science! I didn’t take many photos, but will include a few here to give a taste.
Cave-master Libing Zhang and Champion Chun-Xiang Li very graciously hosted me and princely Paulo Labiak for fieldwork in Sichuan before the Botanical Congress. After a brief acclimatization in Chengdu, we hiked up Mt. Emei. It was spectacular, if humbling–we climbed up stone steps almost continually from approximately 600m elevation to 3000m. Libing played it cool, and lulled us into a sense of confidence, and then, wham, hit us with 2400 vertical meters of steps. And so many ferns! So many plants in general–it felt like the mountain had the flora of eastern North America x5 (loads of maples, Rubus, Polystichum, Cornus, Carya, etc., etc.) and then an additional flora of strange things I had never heard of before. Following Mt. Emei, we spent four days around Baoxing (the former “Muping” of, e.g., Cystopteris moupinensis fame), which was also spectacular.
Our indentured, I mean interns are leaving! The Rothfels lab was lucky enough to host two fantastic volunteers this summer–Jonathan Qu and Sraavya Sambara. They were awesome! And while it seems like they’ve just arrived, rumor has it that summer is almost over. Very sad for us! I have a suspicion, however, that we haven’t seen the last of these two…
The Botany meeting was in Fort Worth this year (post on that to follow), and in advance of the meeting, James Beck organized fieldwork in the Wichita and Arbuckle Mountains, Oklahoma. Over the course of the week we found 27 species of ferns and lycophytes (I think that was our final tally), which seems quite respectable to me! Our team included James from Wichita State, me (Carl), Forrest, and Ingrid from UC Berkeley, George Yatskievych from UT Austin, and Layne Huiet, Wei-Ting, and Tzu-Tong Kao from Duke. Good times and chiggers were had by all.
At the fieldhouse we had a very small very fiesty visitor (a Copperhead?). No botanists or snakes were injured in the recording of this video.
The Rothfels lab was blessed with a visit from a proud shocker, the legendary Dr. James Beck, of Wichita State. “Shocker” — one who harvests wheat into shocks? Or, in this case, an animated shock itself:
James was here for a labwork blitz, refining a protocol for generating genome-scale data from herbarium specimens using double-digest RAD sequencing (ddRAD). Over the course of a week, he and Ingrid ground through two plates of samples, from beginning to end. Very excited to see how this works out!
In between pipetting and bead clean-ups, James squeezed in some spore counting from apomictic Myriopteris gracilis (32 spores/sporangium = apomict; 64 spores/sporangium = sexual). In a flurry of glycerol and microscopy, he was able to count his 600th specimen–look for the results soon in a journal near you.
James’ visit also provided us with an excuse to get outside and look for some lycophytes! Over the course of some happy tromping in Marin Co. we found both Isoetes howellii and Isoetes nuttallii, as well as a nice smattering of ferns.
