The last day.

Happy New year all bryobureaux browsers. I have been slack as usual and not posted for a while.
So what's happening?
I am on Chistmas break from work until the 2nd January, so have been relaxing over the holidays.
I mentioned in my last posting that I have a student Melita starting with me in December to work on a molecular project with the liverwort group, Fossombronia. So far we have sequences of all my cultures for ITS (Internal Transcribed Spacer) which is found in the nucleus. Melita will also be generating sequences from the chloroplast regions, rps4 and trnL-F.
I have been playing around with the ITS data to generate phylogenetic trees using PAUP. So far so good. The groups that I have identified as distinct species have been coming out together.
In the new year, hoping to generate SEM pics of the spores from each of the culture populations so will post some images on this blog.
Well off to the mall.
Thanks Laura for your comment. It didn't seem to want to post onto the blog so will try again.

Hot November

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/901/1

I lied ........ well I didn't mean to. Meant to post more regularly, but that fell in a heap.
Too tied up with work and home life. Anyway, preparing these days for my summer student this summer for a 9 week stint of working on Fossombronia. My student, Melita will be doing a molecular project to look at the biodiversity and phylogeny of the Australian Fossombronias. Over the last 5 and half years I have been collecting Fossombronias and attempting to get them into axenic culture. This has been quite successful, but I have lost many through growth cabinet breakdown. I have lost cultures either through temp. drop and freezing my plants or rising temps that finish up cooking my plants. Lost over half of my Western Australian collection of Fossombronias last year. Bums!
But I do also have other problems - contamination from fungi or bacteria. Fungus is hard to irradicate but I use streptomycin in my medium for control of the bacteria. It kinda works.
Anyone else out there culturing bryophytes. I know there are not many people putting time and effort into such projects. It is time consuming, but the rewards are worth it, I think.

ohfivenovember

Finished marking my bryophyte section of Plant Diversity course - mmmm - I don't think the students quite got was I was asking them. Oh well.
So what has been happening in the bryo world of late? Discovered a paper published in 2004 which is a review of hybridization in bryophytes. A very good overview.
Written by Rayna Natcheva and Nils Cronberg in the Canadian Journal of Botany. 2004. Vol.82: 1687-1704.
They make the point that interspecific hybridization among bryophytes has been seriously underestimated. Certainly appears to be relatively more common among mosses than liverworts and there are no records of it occurring at all in hornworts .... well yet anyway!
I also finally got around to downloading my latest edition of The Bryological Times which is a newsletter put out by the International Association of Bryologists which i have been a member of for 25 years this year!
It has a small piece in it by JeriLyn Peck on moss harvesting. She has an interesting website too talking about her research. It is caught my interest as I am keen to know how the moss harvesting industry here in Australia is doing. I am guessing it is occurring unsustainably but no-one that I know is doing any work here in Australia.

http://www.strengthinperspective.com/JPmoss/index.htm

But I believe it can occur sustainably and also have an impact on invasive mosses from Europe which are smothering our native bryos and vascular herbs.
There is a project there.

No, no no, not November

I can't believe it is November already. the year is almost over and man, I only have a million things yet to do before December.
Finally received a blog comment from a fellow colleague and fellow blogger Laura. Thanks Laura! I finally got around to looking at my hotmail and saw your comment. So it is published now!
One of my readers told me they didn't get the images just the little grey box with the cross through it.
Isn't technology wonderful? Mind you I can see my images.
Are people seeing my images or not though? Send me comments as to whether or not you can see them.



So what is happening in the world of bryophytes?

Its springtime heading for a hot and long summer. Have been culturing hornworts and Fossombronias of late and fingers crossed they will germinate for me.
My images are of the plant in culture (Anthoceros punctatus) and its parent population as it would appear in the wild. It retains its morphology amazingly well under artificial culture.
Promise I will try to post a bit more regularly .........

Red October

It is the 2nd day of October and the last day of a long weekend in the ACT. My family and I went out west to travel to a small township called Forbes in central NSW. It is famous for being the burial site of one of Australia's bushrangers Ben Hall, who was shot to death by police at the very young age of 27.
Forbes is a lovely town, very neat and tidy but also very picturesque. But man, it was very warm and would be extremely hot in the summertime.
I was hoping to find bryophytes while we were out camping in Conimbla National Park, but it is so dry there was hardly any bryos about at all. We went for a short walk through the bush near our campsite and found fabulous lichen covered rocks with large patches of the moss Campylopus introflexus very much dried, but still alive.
I will post images of both the dried colonies and a still hydrated colony.

bryophytes and insects

Recently there was discussion on a listserve that I belong to (bryonet) about an article that was published about the role of insects in facilitating fertilisation between male and female bryophytes. The article tested the hypothesis that insects do indeed help in the transfer of sperm from male plants to receptive female plants.
But check out this small video of insects, moss sperm, spore liberation and Collembolas.


http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/901/1


You will need to go to the end of the article and it has a link to the video.

bryophytes and insects

Recently there was discussion on a listserve that I belong to (bryonet) about an article that was published about the role of insects in facilitating fertilisation between male and female bryophytes. The article tested the hypothesis that insects do indeed help in the transfer of sperm from male plants to receptive female plants.
But check out this small video of insects, moss sperm, spore liberation and Collembolas.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/901/1

I hope this works.

Check it out.

Wednesday but whose counting ....

There are so many projects out there but not enough hours in the day.
Today or was that yesterday I received an email from a botanist down south in Victoria who recently discovered a new population of Treubia and is keeping an eagle eye on it.
He recently came back from observations of the population and let me know that they are sexual and producing babies! I am hoping to have the privilege of attempting to culture this rather beautiful liverwort (are there ugly ones?) from spores under sterile conditions. If an easy thing to do (which I have my doubts about!) that could translate into a possible tool in the armoury for plant conservation.
Then out of the blue we also happened to get a return loan of our Treubia collections - now is that coincidence or is that coincidence?
Treubia has been figuring a lot in phylogenies of late, with the most recent and comprehensive molecular phylogeny of liverworts in the latest volume of the Bryologist.
[Great publication, but so bloody expensive - but hey, it does come from the home of capitalism!]
Laura Forrest etal has included the largest number of liverworts in a molecular phylogeny to date. And one of the stars - Treubia of course. By the way the paper is great too.
Now getting back to projects - how about one on Cuban hornworts. Now that I will leave to the next post.
Google Treubia under images if you would like to see what they look like.
I am hoping to post my own images of this liverwort in a few weeks time. But I have to post an image of something. ummmmm.
How about my Uruguayan Corsinia? Keep reading folks.