team member profiles « The Echinacea Project

Profile: Rachel Mills

Rachel is a 3rd year master’s student at the University of Minnesota in Ruth Shaw’s lab. Her research is focused on the rapid evolution of invasive plant species in prairie fragments. She received her bachelors degree at the Central Washington University, and did post-bac work in the Australian rainforest with the School for Field Studies. She is a native of Washington state.

On the side Rachel enjoys breakdancing, hip-hop dancing, and gripping/gaffing on movie/television sets.

Profiler: Andy McCall

Hello everyone, this is Andy McCall reporting from the farmhouse in Douglas Co. Minnesota.

I’m currently an assistant professor of biology at Denison University, a small liberal arts college (a SLAC!) in Granville, Ohio. I, like many people on the project, graduated from Carleton College , where I first learned to appreciate and love the prairie landscape under the tutelage of Mark Mckone .

Needless to say, I love teaching and learning and have wanted to be a professor since my time at Carleton. After Carleton, I studied alpine flies in New Zealand while earning my Master’s degree at the University of Canterbury, leafcutter ants in Costa Rica, and wild radishes in California.

I received my doctorate in population biology from UC-Davis in 2006 with Rick Karban and spent some time in Ruth Shaw’s lab at the University of Minnesota last summer, thinking about inbreeding, flowers, and insects — a few of my favorite things! I met Ruth when she came to UC-Davis for a week as a workshop speaker in the Center for Population Biology and we immediately hit it off because we both have done work on the lovely annual plant, Nemophila menziesii . She introduced me to Stuart and the Echinacea project, and the rest is history!

Ruth, Stuart, and I were lucky enough to receive funding through the National Science Foundation to support our work on pollination and seed predation this summer, and I have received generous funds from Denison and the Battelle Foundation to support the students I brought from Denison this year: Josh Drizin, Jameson Pfeil, and Colin Venner. I’m psyched to be part of the project as I am certain that we are learning brand-new things about both Echinacea biology and prairie restoration.

Profile: Josh Drizin

I’m Josh Drizin, a rising senior at Denison University. I’m majoring in Biology (minor in Chemistry). I’m interested in plants, and possibly more specifically in population ecology. I joined Team Echinacea because I wanted the experience in field work and the project sounded interesting. My tick count to date is 10. I rather enjoy photography and quite like listening to music (I need to get back into playing guitar, though).

Amy Alstad, part deux

Let me reintroduce myself. In rare forgetful moment, I left my self logged into the team computer at the farm house, and a prankster who shall not be named shared with the readers of this blog a couple of facts about my life. All of these facts, with the possible exception of the title of the entry are true. I’m a biology major at Carleton, and will be spending the fall semester studying rain forest ecology in Costa Rica. I like being outside in any and all capacities, love ornithology, and enjoy making and consuming delicious food.

Jameson

I’m Jameson Pfeil, the hairiest member of team Echinacea. I’m a rising senior at Denison University in Granville, OH. At School I live at an intentional community called the Homestead. I’m majoring in Biology at Denison and I’m trying to specialize within Biology, but I haven’t settled on anything quite yet. I joined team Echinacea to get experience in the field and to learn a new discipline of biology. I’m originally from southeastern Pennsylvania, most recently Lancaster, PA, just west of the city .(and no I’m not Amish).

You gotta love me: Profile of Colin Venner

I am Colin Venner, Biology major from Denison University. Orignially of Saline, Michigan (just outside of Ann Arbor), I am in the class of 2009 and I am a Taurus (though I don’t fit the profile for one). I enjoy several different styles of music and have been known to “cut a mean rug”. When I’m not counting anthers of flowering Echinacea heads you can find me enjoying life and smiling frequently.

virgin prairie makes me hot

Hi i’m Amy Alstad. I’m 5′ 113/4″. The saddest part of life is that i’m not 6′ tall. I’m from MN and i’m going to be a junior at Carleton college

Profile: Julie Nicol

My name is Julie Nicol. I graduated from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) with a degree in biology in 2007. I am from Seattle, WA and hope to move back at some point. In the meantime I’m here working on the Echinacea project. I really enjoy the area; it’s quite beautiful. In the fall I’ll be heading to Chicago to work for Stuart at the Chicago Botanic Garden until next spring. Eventually I will (most likely) go to grad school, but I intend to spend the next few years figuring out exactly what I want to study.

On a more personal note, I enjoy being outside (hiking, kayaking, diving, windsurfing, etc.), reading (one of my favorite books is The Master and Margarita), and music (I have wide-ranging tastes from joy division to dar williams). I am also interested in and concerned with social justice and environmental issues.

Microsatellites in Echinacea… they do exist

Hello all,
So this is my very first blog entry so it will be lacking all the neat links to pictures et al in that are in other people’s entries but it will talk about Echinacea.

Since this is my first blog I should probably spend a little time introducing myself. My name is Jennifer I am a in an inter-disciplinary PhD program, called LEAP, at the University of Illinois at Chicago in conjunction with the Chicago Botanic Garden. LEAP stands for Landscape Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes, it is an NSF funded IGERT program aimed at increasing biodiversity in human altered landscapes. For a much better description of LEAP see http://www.uic.edu/depts/bios/leap/. As for the Echinacea Project I have been involved with the project first as an intern back in 2003-2004 then as a graduate student (since summer 2005). My research mainly focuses on understanding how flowering phenology (when a plant flowers) shapes seed set, pollen movement, and ultimately genetic structure in a population. For more see my website at http://www2.uic.edu/~ison/.

To understand how flowering phenology shapes population structure we use a variety of methods. First we collect phenology data in the common garden. The current protocol has us counting anthers shedding pollen every other day. We then collect the seed heads in the fall and individually weigh a subset of the seeds to get an estimate of seed set. Why individually weigh seeds? Well it is the only non-destructive method of determining if an achene (the technical term for fruits in the Asteraceae) actually has a viable embryo. We know that 97% or seeds weighing greater than 2 mg will germinate and 91% of less weighing less than 2 mg will not germinate. As of this spring we have individually weighed (with the help of an amazing volunteer named Art) weighed 30,211 seeds. This June Art has embarked on weighing another 3,000 seeds from the 2006 flowering plants. So far we know that late flowering plants set much less seed than early or peak flowering plants. To get at the hereditability of flowering phenology we planted a second common garden (yes there is another common garden) on a site called Hegg Lake owned by the DNR. The site was planted with just about 4,000 seedlings in May 2006 and the plants will hopefully flower before I finish my PhD.

Finally, to understand how flowering phenology influences pollen movement we are using molecular genetic techniques, specifically microsatellites markers. Microsatellites are a molecular genetic marker that consist of repeating non-coding regions in the genome (eg GATGATGATGAT). Since they are repeating non-coding regions they mutate relatively rapidly so there are different number of repeats for the same microsatellite in a population–alleles. With these microsatellites we will be able to, eventually, take a seed from a known maternal plant and find out who the dad is. I developed microsatellites specifically for Echinacea last fall at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I now need to determine of these microsatellites I found do they actually have enough alleles to conduct paternity analysis. While everyone else has been up in Minnesota flying kites I have been spending time in the genetics lab trying to get the microsatellites to work. After spending too long figuring out the optimal number of cycles and temperature in the PCR, plus how much, if any, Mg to add I finally have been having success with about 5 microsatellites.

Today I ran four out of the five primers on 16 plants (8 from the preserve and 8 from Steven’s approach) and had multiple alleles!!! I had between 4 to 6 alleles just in these 16 plants. It was very exciting after spending so long playing with PCR conditions. It was very rewarding to run samples that actually worked and even better that all the microsatellites were at least moderately variable. My goal is to get 8 primers with all with around 6 alleles, which should be enough to do figure out who the dad is. For my next blog entry I’ll see if I can figure out how to add pictures and I’ll insert some images of my microsatellite alleles.

I think that is more than enough for my first entry. I will hopefully have more exciting news regarding the microsatellites before I come up to Minnesota (which is on July 15th).
Night!
Jennifer

Notes to self:
Equipment for MN
-2 meter sticks
-camera
-data logger (?)–talk to JF
Finish up at CBG
-put seeds into freezer–talk to AS?
-data entry for Theresa
-get tissue samples into fresh silica gel
-molecular work for John and Eric

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