A first comprehensive analysis of the Marchantia genome was published today in Cell. Marchantia is a thalloid liverwort, a representative of a lineage of land plants that is among the earliest diverging groups of land plants. The relationships among ‘bryophytes’ (i.e., haploid dominant land-plants, including liverworts, hornworts, and mosses) remains uncertain, but liverworts are a strong… Continue reading →
The lab went on a week-long collecting expedition to Florida in early August, with our primary goal being to collect some understudied, warm-water dinoflagellates. We collected in both freshwater and open ocean environments, isolating single cells with drawn glass capillaries. We won’t really know how successful the expedition was for several months as we work… Continue reading →
This is my attempt to describe my lab’s research using the “Up-Goer Five Text Editor” (http://splasho.com/upgoer5/): Green things are very old. To get food, they sit in the sun and drink it up. Long ago they used to be two things, one green, and one not-green. The not-green thing ate the green thing, and pretty… Continue reading →
Our collaborative paper on dinoflagellate evolution has now appeared in PNAS: Major transitions in dinoflagellate evolution unveiled by phylotranscriptomics Jan Janouškovec did a terrific job summarizing the current state of knowledge of dinoflagellate phylogeny and the implications this has for character evolution within the group. I think this paper is a significant contribution in dinoflagellate… Continue reading →
The Palmophyllales are recently discovered and poorly understood deep-sea green algae that are phylogenetically close to the base of the green algal tree. An excellent new paper from Fred Leliaert looks at chloroplast genomic data from Verdigellas peltata (out of a specimen dredged up during the Deep Water Horizon oil spill) and places the organism in a… Continue reading →
A new postdoc, Dr. Brittany Ott, joined the lab just in time for “Snowmageddon,” the heavy snowfall at the end of January. Brittany joins us from West Virginia University, where she earned her Ph.D. studying the gut and surface mucilage microflora of medicinal leeches. She has a strong background in microbiology and bioinformatics, and will be… Continue reading →
I have a book review coming out next month in BioScience (the publication of AIBS, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which is a good organization that works toward integrating the life sciences). The text of the review is below. The copyright agreement allows me to present the text here, but to see the typeset… Continue reading →
One of the main reasons that I study the biological diversity of dinoflagellates is that they are a living laboratory for the evolution of endosymbiotic organelles. This is at least in part because, although they have plastids (chloroplasts) that seem to be ancestral to the group, dinoflagellates are all purely photosynthetic organisms. Some are parasitic or predatory (and… Continue reading →
We published a recent review on the “Evolutionary Origin of a Terrestrial Flora” in Current Biology. It is a part of a special issue on the History of Life on Earth. It walks through a general overview of morphological and physiological transitions in the movement from charophyte green algae to a terrestrial flora. I had originally… Continue reading →
I received this query from a high school student: I currently am in high school at [a good school] and I’m very interested in science. In my biology class, I was learning about how chloroplasts and mitochondria have cell membranes, the only organelles to do so in the current eukaryotic cell. I was thinking about… Continue reading →
