One of the photos in the paper by Philip Bell-Doyon and colleagues made the cover of the journal Environmental DNA. The photo was taken by Jorge Ceballos and Maycol Madrid (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama). A summary of the paper: Using a combination of Sanger-sequencing, 16S metagenomics and whole-genome sequencing, we have elucidated the bacteriome of  the corralled roots of the only epiphytic gymnosperm. One hundred and sixty‐five amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) were f...

Lab photo Fall 2020—— Standing (left to right): Anthony, Marta, Loïc, Laura, JC, Sandrine ——Sitting (left to right): Philip, Aurélie, Dennis. Absent: Adriel —– Credit: Loren Leport

Despite the global and local uncertainty and distress, we have an exciting beginning of the fall session. We have some very good news to share: We have a new graduate student in our lab: Laura Hjartarson. Laura will be starting her master's degree under the supervision of Dr. Line Rochefort  and co-supervised by J.C. Villarreal. She'll be working under our newly funded grant on Restauration of northern mines, with emphasis on the metagenomics of damaged and recovered soils. Laura is intereste...

Extant land plants consist of two deeply divergent groups, tracheophytes and bryophytes, which shared a common ancestor some 500 million years ago. While information about vascular plants and the two of the three lineages of bryophytes, the mosses and liverworts, is steadily accumulating, the biology of hornworts is poorly explored. Yet, as the sister group to liverworts and mosses, hornworts are critical in understanding the evolution of key land plant traits. Until recently, there was no h...

We are happy to share selected contributions from IAB IMOSS SEB 2019, the 2019 International Association of Bryologists (IAB), International Molecular Moss Science Society (iMOSS) and la Sociedad Española de Briología (SEB) joint conference, held in Madrid, Spain, on July 9-12, 2019.  The papers are published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Sciences and listed below: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/11134/highlights-of-iab-imoss-seb-2019-joint-conference#articles  

Each year Laval University launches a competitive process to postulate few candidates to the Canada Research Chairs. This year, the Villarreal Lab was awarded one of the seven Canada Research Chair, two professors of the Faculty of Science and Engineering were granted this competitive award. The 5-year project deals with the symbiosis between tropical plants (especially gymnosperms) and microbes (virus, fungi and bacteria) at a genomic and metabolomic level. The research is mostly based in Pa...

Symbioses between plants and nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria are benchmark biological systems to understand mutualism and patterns of coevolution. The diversity of cyanobacteria associated to non-vascular land plants is still being unraveled, with a huge gap in knowledge from tropical areas, especially in hornworts. Hornworts are arguably the oldest land plant lineage with a widespread symbiosis with cyanobacteria (Villarreal & Renzaglia 2015). We focus on the Neotropical horn...

As part of his undergraduate research project, Philip Bell-Doyon surveyed the Panamanian endemic cycad Zamia pseudoparasitica from May to July 2018 (here a previous paper from his project). The species is the only strictly epiphytic gymnosperm and its life history is little known due to the inaccessibility of the plants. He used single-rope and prussik-knot tree climbing techniques to estimate population density and ant-garden specificity were evaluated. Zamia pseudoparasitica is locally com...

Stigomena is a genus of cyanobacteria that is often the photobiont associated with the lichen genus Stereocaulon. To elucidate the evolutionary relationships between Stereocaulon and Stigonema and assess whether there is specificity or selectivity at the ecosystem or species levels, we performed phylogenetic analyses on specimens collected throughout Eastern Canada. We generated ITS sequences from the fungal component of the symbiosis and sequences from the operon rbcL-rbcX and the trnL ...

Le sexe est répandu dans l’arbre de la vie. La reproduction sexuée est très importante pour la survie et la maintenance de toutes les espèces complexes. Néanmoins, la clonalité et d’autres méthodes de reproduction asexuée existent, particulièrement chez les plantes. L’anthocérote Nothoceros aenigmaticus est un exemple d’une plante qui n’a pas de reproduction sexuée. Par ailleurs, les organes males (anthéridies) ne développent pas de spermatozoïdes fonctionnels. Cette plante se trouve dans le...