Jenna joined the Rothfels lab as a postdoc in January of 2023 after completing her PhD with Brent Mishler at UC Berkeley and a postdoc with Rebecca Dikow at the Smithsonian Institution. She is an organismal biologist who integrates plant physiology, phylogenetics, ecology, and evolutionary genetics to understand plant evolution and adaptations to life on land. In particular, her work focuses on three areas: (I) the mechanisms of stress tolerance, (II) the processes that generate and maintain the diversity of sexual systems, and (III) the evolutionary history of adaptation to extreme environments.
To date, Jenna’s research has focused on the moss genus Syntrichia, whose species are key primary producers in biological soil crusts (biocrusts), complex communities of bryophytes, lichens, and other microorganisms living on the soil surface of drylands. Syntrichia contains about 100 species, occurs worldwide, and demonstrates an unusual amount of variation in ecology and reproductive biology (including both dioicous and monoicous—or unisexual and bisexual—taxa), even among close relatives. Understanding the evolutionary relationships of this group has been difficult as previous studies have found that in some species, some genes appear more closely related to other Syntrichia species than to the other genes or members of its own species, which may be a result of hybridization and/or allopolyploidy. Furthermore, several such Syntrichia species have been notoriously taxonomically difficult and are commonly confused with members of (and may sometimes be included within) the S. ruralis complex, which itself has been referred to as “a chaos of diversification,” (Hedenäs et al., 2019). However, until recently, available technology has been largely insufficient to untangle the chaos and understand the reticulate history that might be buried in Syntrichia. In the Rothfels lab, Jenna is working to infer the history of any genome duplications, horizontal transfers, and hybridization events using appropriate approaches for phylogenetic networks and polyploid phylogenetics (e.g. Rothfels, 2021) at each step from sampling to sequence data to bioinformatics and inference.
References:
Hedenäs, Lars, Jochen Heinrichs, and María Teresa Gallego. “The Scandinavian Syntrichia ruralis complex (Musci, Pottiaceae): a chaos of diversification.” Plant Systematics and Evolution 305 (2019): 639-661.
Rothfels, Carl J. “Polyploid phylogenetics.” New Phytologist230.1 (2021): 66-72.