The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Dendrophthora sp.

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

This new species of mistletoe (Dendrophthora sp.; Loranthaceae) is a preliminary sketch from collections made by Larry Dorr (US) and Basil Stergios (formerly PORT) for the Flora of Guaramacal project, which focuses on the vascular plants of a national park in the Venezuelan Andes. Daniela Canelón, Curator of Herbario PORT, is especially interested in parasitic epiphytes and with the assistance of Miguel Niño, Botany Research Collaborator, and Marcos Caraballo, Peter Buck Fellow, they have determined that the material represents a new, as yet undescribed species. The collections provide a challenge to illustrate in that as they dry the plant color darkens to almost black. Rehydration in a wetting solution is required for dissecting and illustrating the tiny flowers and fruits. Caraballo has been generous in lending Tangerini his books and papers on the genus so that typical views by other illustrators can be studied to show how this particular collection differs from similar species.

Honors and Awards

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Vicki Funk has been honored by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT). Linda Watson and Lucinda McDade have spearheaded a fundraising effort to establish a new endowment to allow ASPT to make an annual graduate student research grant award in honor of Vicki Funk. Many colleagues have generously contributed so that the effort has been wildly successful and a large endowment has been secured that will allow ASPT to begin awarding an annual Vicki Funk Graduate Student Research Grant in 2020. This ASPT endowment in support of graduate student research joins other named endowed grants that ASPT awards annually to the highest ranked proposals received from graduate student members of the organization. The Vicki A. Funk Grant joins the Rogers McVaugh, William R. Anderson, Shirley and Alan Graham, and W. Hardy Eshbaugh grants in providing up to $1,500, and is intended to help student researchers defray the costs of doing research in any area within plant systematics.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Daniel Zuleta is a postdoctoral fellow working on tropical forest mortality with ForestGEO and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE–Tropics). His research has focused on understanding the spatial variation in drought-induced tree mortality and biomass dynamics, as well as assessing the interactions between the species’ drought tolerances and their spatial distributions in Amazon forests. As a postdoctoral fellow, Zuleta aims to understand the mechanisms driving tropical forest mortality in order to develop mortality models that can be included in the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES) model and improve predictions of forest response to environmental changes. He will use long-term forest dynamics data from ForestGEO sites along with annual mortality censuses established by Gabriel Arellano to explore tree death modes and implications on stand carbon dynamics. He will additionally collect data on plant stress attributes and the response of trees to extreme climatic events to infer the physiological mechanisms of tree death. Zuleta is based at the ForestGEO headquarters at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

YES! Interns experience a summer of mistletoes and lichens

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

This past summer, the Department of Botany hosted four interns through the Youth Engagement through Science (YES!) internship program at the National Museum of Natural History. YES! is a career immersion and science communication program for youths between the ages of 14-19, who are currently enrolled in high school (grades 9-11) in the Washington D.C. region. The YES! program gives interns practical experience through a hands-on science internship with Smithsonian science staff. In addition to conducting research, the teens also had access to behind-the-scenes tours and field trips, creative studio workshops, college preparatory classes, and the opportunity to create their own TED-type talks. To protect the privacy of these minors, their last names are being withheld in this article.

YES! interns Leah and Nina (left to right) learn laboratory techniques to study the diversity of parasitic mistletoes. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Marcos Caraballo mentored two YES! interns, Nina and Leah, on a project exploring the morphological diversity and genomics of parasitic mistletoes. Both interns learned how to perform microscopy work, DNA extractions, PCR amplifications, and sequence editing, and visited the U.S. Botanic Garden to study the diversity of plants growing there. Nina focused her activities on lab work, including purification of DNA from herbarium specimens, primer design, and visualization and interpretation of agarose gel images. Leah delved into plant taxonomy, learning how to dissect flowers and interpret their inner structures, taking high quality images using a modern dissecting scope. Both Nina and Leah presented their summer projects at the YES! program community day on August 2, where each prepared an exhibition and showed mistletoes to museum visitors.

YES! interns Sarah and Maria (left to right) learn laboratory techniques to study the diversity of lichen. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Manuela Dal Forno worked with two YES! interns, Sarah and Maria, on the project "Lichen Diversity in the Tropics." The interns learned about lichens in general, especially taxonomic characters and chemical tests, and dove into a focus on identifying bacteria and fungi from different lichen cultures. They selected and photographed cultures, extracted and sequenced DNA, and generated culture guides for future comparisons. Maria and Sarah participated in two outreach programs at Q?rius, teaching museum visitors about lichens and their experience in the internship program. Sarah and Maria also worked alongside Julia Adams, a doctoral student from the University of California at Riverside. Adams was at the museum for 10 weeks conducting research on the systematics of the lichen Acarospora socialis from southwestern United States. During her time here, Adams worked on the taxonomy of 32 samples of this species complex housed at the US National Herbarium and performed lab work to acquire molecular data on these historical specimens.

Doctoral student Julia Adams, YES! intern Sarah, Manuela Dal Forno, and YES! intern Maria. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)