We lost the director of our Institute, Louis Bernatchez. Since my arrival to the IBIS in 2016, Louis showed extraordinary support.  He was also the best example of leadership I have seen so far. His intellectual contribution to science is astronomical and his passion and support for his students and staff are legendary.  We are all saddened by the loss of a giant. JC, September 29, 2023

Exciting news about our research regarding moss-symbiosis. Moss-bacterial communities have a core microbiome and bacteria recruited from environmental sources, and symbiotic N2-fixing bacteria contribute to the N budget in northern ecosystems through biological nitrogen fixation. This process may be affected by the abundance of diazotrophs and moss nutrient content. As part of his thesis research, Dennis Escolástico and collaborators (Jean-Philippe Bellenger, Charlotte Blasi, Nicolas De...

Nous avons des nouvelles de notre équipe de travail. Marta et Annie St-Louis ont fait un jour de vulgarisation sur les lichens à la Maison Léon Provancher. En plus, Philip vient de publier (voir pdf) des lichens del'Archipel-de-Mingan.  Philip a fait un entrevue sur la diversité et l'importance des lichens de la Côte-Nord. Bravo !! ------------ We have news from our lab. Marta and Annie St-Louis shared her passion and knowledge of lichens with the public at La Maison Léon Provanc...

This month we did fieldwork in the Parc des Grands Jardins and collected reindeer lichens (Cladonia stellaris) for whole genome sequencing. We got also great news, Lilisbeth del Carmen Rodríguez-Castro obtained a prestigious ELAP fellowship to visit the lab from August 2023-February 2024.  Lilisbeth will be working on the metagenomic assembly of bacterial epiphytes associated to the canopy gymnosperm, Zamia pseudoparasitica. Bravo Lilisbeth ! Finally, Adriel M. Sierra Pinilla was a...

From left to right:  Dennis, Alyson, JC, Marta, Philip, Chinedou, Laura, Adriel.

This week we have an invited speaker, Guillaume Chomicki. Guillaume has done some fantastic work on mutualism and plant-ant interactions. After his conference, we did a lab "field-trip" to the Québec National Parliament, a beautiful building with much history. We also enjoyed a sunny and warm spring day after a long gruelling winter.    

During our "lecture week" or a winter break, we have a time off from the strike.  In that week, we headed to Panama to do some fieldwork. One of the young undergraduates in our lab, Mia Roy, went to assist Lilisbeth in her fieldwork. Lilisbeth is doing fantastic work on the phyllosphere microbiota of the only epiphytic gymnosperm, Zamia pseudoparasitica. In the field, we continued the census of one of the Panamanian endemics Zamia nana. We saw no snakes this time!!, and collected multiple mal...

We just got the news that Lilisbeth Rodríguez-Castro, was awarded a STRI short-term fellowship . These are highly competitive and prestigious fellowships to foster research on tropical settings, especially Panama. Lilisbeth will continue her fascinating work on the only epiphytic gymnosperm, Zamia pseudoparasitica. Her work is part of her master's thesis in the Program of Environmental Microbiology at the Universidad de Panamá.  She's looking into the functional genomics of the p...

As part of our Canada Research Chair on symbiosis of tropical plants, we have done fieldwork in Panama with Adriel Sierra Pinilla (doctoral student), Lilisbeth Rodríguez-Castro (master's student in the program of Environmental Microbiology, Universidad de Panamá) and Pedro Castillo-Caballero (a talented undergraduate at the Universidad de Panamá).  Adriel is doing research on the impact of the forest fragmentation on Amazonian epiphylls, his fieldwork was conducted (a few years ago) in the ...

Global warming is a climatic phenomenon of unprecedented impact in various ecosystems of the world. Its consequences, especially on polar regions, from ice melting to temperature records, is now well documented. Studying the responses to climate change in the tropics is of capital importance to predict the impacts of global warming at a global scale The mostly tropical genus Zamia is the most ecologically diverse clade within Cycadales, and thus, is an ideal candidate for global...