Category: BryologyPage 2 of 4
Studies in evolution, ecology and conservation of mosses, liverworts and hornworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
There’s something quite melancholy about going back through all the little paper packets of voucher specimens, remembering who and where you were when you collected them, and thinking…
The Science building at the Botanics closes down between Christmas and New Year, so any last bits of work for the year have to be packed up and…
Now that we have six wild-collected accessions of Plagiochasma currently growing on public display in the RBGE Arid House, from China, the US (Texas) and Saudi Arabia, I’ve…
I’m just back from field work in New Zealand with Yoan Coudert, a French CNRS funded researcher based at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon. A major objective…
Karla Yunuen Magaña Marcial is a bryologist on a mission to solve a global puzzle. She is visiting the Botanics from her home institute, Michoacan University of Saint Nicholas…
Despite a reputation for being rather a rare breed, this week, purely by chance, we have found ourselves with an embarrassment of bryologists at the Gardens. As well…
Our short damp November days offer the perfect opportunity for leafing through reels of photographs from earlier in the year; many of mine are from a short trip…
After RBGE’s initial involvement in land plant DNA barcode marker selection, culminating in a couple of 2009 papers that both utilized bryophyte barcoding data sets, we started a…
On Thursday the 28th September, we welcomed Professors Takayuki Kohchi and Ryuichi Nishihama, from Kyoto University, Japan, to the Botanics. Professor Kohchi’s lab is renowned for their evolutionary…
Enigmatic and isolated although it is, it seems that our Australian colleagues have now “got their eye in” for complex thalloid liverwort Monocarpus sphaerocarpus – after many years…
As far as our 2013 RBGE MSc project proposal to generate a phylogeny of Octoblepharum goes, Juan Carlos Villarreal, Noris Salazar Allen and I were clearly not the…
Spring Break’s a big thing in the US, and spring of 2005, Juan Carlos Villarreal and I spent ours on a road-trip down through Louisianna, looking for the…
Several years back, I postdocced in Barbara Crandall-Stotler’s lab in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. In the late Autumn of 2003, Panamanian bryologist Noris Salazar Allen spent a few…
Once we realised that most of our plate of Schistidium ITS2 amplifications had been successful, it was an easy decision to process them all for DNA sequencing. If…
Once the polymerase chain reaction is over, it’s time to Run The Gel; this is make-or-break time, when we find out if our PCR amplification has actually worked….
After we extracted a plate’s worth (12 columns by 8 rows, or 96 samples) of Schistidium DNA, the next step in our process is to copy a preselected…
Just over a week into our current Synthesys-funded Schistidium project, and Wolfgang has picked through piles of packets of mosses, selecting the 96 that we would most like…
The moss Campylopus introflexus, native to the southern hemisphere, is now considered an invasive plant in parts of Europe and North America. While it occurs on some natural…
There are very few bryophytes growing in the living collections of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. What I mean by this is that there are very few bryophytes…
Monday 27th March was the start of a month-long visit to RBGE by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics‘s Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer, funded by the EU Synthesys Access…