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Category Archives: plants
The glaciers of the last ice age left their mark on the genetic diversity of species across the globe
For the last two and a half million years or so — up until a certain species of upright-walking ape descendants really started making their presence known — the greatest force shaping Earth’s biological diversity may well have been ice. … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, insects, mammals, mutation, phylogeography, plants, population genetics
Tagged glacier, Quaternary
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The forest, the trees, and the fungal ties that bind
The following is a guest post by Erin Zess, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the MOI Lab in the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Erin is on Twitter at @ZessingAround. The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for … Continue reading
Posted in book review, ecology, fieldwork, natural history, plants
Tagged Finding the Mother Tree, forestry, mycorrhizae, Suzanne Simard
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Where Did This Flower Come From?
Sam Gregory wrote this post as a project for Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Scientific Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Sam earned a BS in biology and BFA in studio art from Birmingham-Southern College, and is currently pursuing an MS in … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, blogging, Coevolution, demography, ecology, evolution, phylogeography, plants, Science Communication
Tagged genetics, Invasions, plants, StudentSciComm
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Microbial mutualists parted ways with this host plant — multiple times
Posted in evolution, microbiology, phylogenetics, plants
Tagged Bradyrhizobium, legume-rhizobium symbiosis, mutualism
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One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes and Not a Single to Spare
What is the weight of a transcriptome? How about a thousand? Every day new sequencing machines are purring away, base pair by base pair, producing novel insights into the genomes of our favorite organisms. As technology improves, costs come down, and opportunities … Continue reading
Posted in phylogenetics, plants, RNAseq, transcriptomics
Tagged Gene duplication, Gene family, polyploidy
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A Master Manipulator: How a bacterium tells a plant what to do
Katrina Sahawneh wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Katrina is working on her MS in Biology and her MA in Education. She currently is studying ER stress … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, blogging, evolution, genomics, plants, Science Communication, selection
Tagged Arabidopsis, bacteria, infection, scicomm, Science Communication
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Field notes from city streets
I spent this morning in Los Angeles city parks, pulling up clover. This attracted less attention than you might expect. Angelenos are, as a group, not inclined to bother people who aren’t doing anyone else any obvious harm, and honestly … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, fieldwork, plants
Tagged Global Urban Evolution Project, Trifolium repens, urban evolution, white clover
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#Evol2017 catch-up — Effects of range expansions on mating system
Two weeks (more about that in a post I’ve written for Wednesday!) after the closing day of the 2017 Evolution Meetings, the Molecular Ecologists have all dispersed from Portland, though some may have left things behind! Still, the conference was so … Continue reading
Posted in conferences, evolution, mating system, natural history, phylogeography, plants, selection
Tagged Baker's Law, drift, inbreeding depression, mating system, range expansion, selfing
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