Hi everyone,

Maria here at CBG. On Tuesday, I came back from Thanksgiving break to find that one of the Dichanthelium plants in the growth chamber was flowering like crazy!

So many flowers! It was also interesting that the plant that flowered looked more stressed (yellow leaves) than some of the other plants.

Today, I collected some pollen (shook the spikelets) on glass slides, stained them with 0.1% toluidine blue, and looked at them under the microscope. It was amazing to see the stained pollen, and how different the viable and inviable pollen looked! I wish I had pictures. I will be learning how to take digital microscopic images (hopefully tomorrow?). So hopefully I’ll be able to stain pollen from all flowers tomorrow, take pictures of the stains, and count pollen to get a sense of levels of viability in Dichanthelium pollen.

Hi everyone!

Maria here. Sorry that I have not posted since the end of summer, but please rest assured that I’ve not run away with my Dichanthelium seeds, but have been working on them for the past -what? 6 months? A long and intimate relationship indeed.

Brief summary of what has happened:

I did a pilot germination & growth study using bulk Dichanthelium seeds. The results of germination study is nicely summarized in this poster that I presented at Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference (MEEC) in Cincinnati 2 weekends ago(?). MEEC was fun and presenting (yapping about) my poster was a lot less nerve-wracking than I had expected:
MWangMEEC2012poster_44_x_36.ppt
Thanks to everyone who helped me in my hectic rush to get the poster done X_X

The seedlings are currently growing in the growth chamber at CBG. (There’s pictures in the poster of seedlings in agar and in plug trays!)

I shall put up some more pictures sometime in the future.
There’s a series of pictures I want to put up showing seeds before and after x-ray and scarification – it’s pretty interesting.

I should also post the R script I used to analyze data and produce the graphs on the flog – unfortunately don’t have the file on this computer.

Right now I’m working on scarifying Dichanthelium seeds for my maternal lines growth and germination experiment (probably should explain in better detail later, likely in another poster).

Other good news you might find interesting:
Thanks to A LOT of help from Stuart and other advisers, I applied and got the Northwestern Academic Year Undergraduate Research Grant for my Dichanthelium project during the school year (maternal line germination/growth experiment), and also very recently, the Garden Club of America Clara Carter Higgins Summer Environmental Study Scholarship =)

If you have any questions about Dichanthelium or anything I talked about, you’re welcome to get in touch. My email is right under the entry title.

Was tidying up my data on Dichanthelium over the weekend and came up with a summary of sorts.

Here’s the summary of seed/plant counts & phenology data.
Dichant_DE_ReturnsSummary.xls

Here’s the raw data + notes + occasional story to help jig my memory 😛
Dichant_DE_All_29Aug2011.xls

I didn’t include counts from Return A (aka 2nd round) because I didn’t start counting seeds until the 3rd round. (I did not realize that I could count the seeds by merely looking into the envelope until Amber Z suggested it….oops!) 500-600 seeds would be my guess for the seed count for that week.

I have yet to harvest from Staffanson this week (Return G), hence the blank.

Let me know if you think of anything that’ll improve the dataset and/or summary! Thanks!