One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants

The onekp project  is an international transdisciplinary consortium made up of 200 top scientists from all over the world and led by Gane Wong (U. of Alberta), Jim Leebens-Mack (U. of Georgia), Mike Barker (U. of Arizona) among many others. The project has generated large-scale transcriptomes for over 1200 plants (from glaucocystophytes, red algae and green plants). The oneKP initiative has published landmark papers on plant evolution (Wicket et al., 2014, PNAS), horizontal gene transfer (Li, Vi...
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Fieldwork in Panama – an update

The Panama grant on cycads is taking shape with most collections being done by our great team. Lilisbeth has organized all the field trips and collected leaves and roots of many Zamia species. Lilisbeth is also doing molecular lab work. Gustavo Salado has done most of the metagenomic and population genetic work on two Zamia species. Omayra Meléndez has done all the culture work and we have a nice collection of endophytes from Zamia nana and Zamia pseudoparasitica. In the summer, Sandri...
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Marta in #Botany2019, Tucson, Arizona, US

Marta attended the annual Botanical Society Meeting (#Botany2019) in Tucson, Arizona. Marta presented her work on the lichen Cladonia stellaris, an emblematic member of the lichen woodland in Eastern North America (for a timely review done by a colleague at Laval, see here). Marta has used population genomics tools to assess diversity and population dynamics of the southernmost lichen woodland in Eastern Canada, here the abstract.        
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Fieldwork in the subarctic (Hudson’s Bay)

Dennis Escolástico, with Kim Damboise and Catherine Boudreault (lichen specialists), spent nearly 2 weeks doing fieldwork in the Hudson's Bay, especifically in Kuujjuarapik and Umiujaq. They were still blocks of ice in the sea! The aim of the field trip was to continue the project of the Québec lichen flora (spearheaded by Serge Payette and Catherine Boudreault). Dennis had the opportunity to collect the woolly mos Racomitrium lanuginosum for his doctoral project. He will be dissecting th...
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Evolution of the vanadium nitrogenase

This is the first paper of the collaborative grant led by Fay-Wei Li to do a worldwide assessment of the symbiosis between hornworts and nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. What's so new about a vanadium nitrogenase? The nitrogenase with a vanadium co-factor had only been  reported from free-living bacteria and cyanobacteria associated to boreal lichens. This "alternative" nitrogenase  is thought to be more active at low temperatures (below 14C) and it plays a crucial role in the nitrogen cycl...
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