The Plant Press

AJ Harris (1978-2023), former Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

By Jun Wen.

Former Smithsonian Botany Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow AJ Harris passed away on January 15, 2023, following a long battle against cervical cancer. She was 44 years old. I was extremely saddened to hear this news from her husband Andrew Dabbs, and with a heavy heart I pass the sad news to her Smithsonian Botany colleagues and to many of her friends.

AJ Harris working at the US National Herbarium in 2016. (photo by Mary Sangrey)

AJ had an impactful career in the field of plant biogeography and evolution where she developed her research integrating plant phylogenetics, biogeography, and biodiversity informatics. She majored in religious studies as an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 2005. She then pursued plant systematics and evolution for her master’s degree at NCSU (2005-2007) with Jenny Xiang as her advisor. She received her doctoral degree in Botany at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in 2015 under the direction of Michael Palmer, with her dissertation research on “Evaluating past and present plant distributions using biodiversity informatics.” I served on her graduate committee at OSU. During her dissertation research, AJ spent ten weeks in at the National Museum of Natural History as a graduate fellow in Botany during the summer of 2014. She was a Smithsonian Botany Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow in 2016-2018. She subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Oberlin College in 2018-2020. AJ accepted an associate professor position in South China Botanical Garden, in Guangzhou, China in 2020.

Relocation of the Botany Research Greenhouse

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

In December 2022, the Department of Botany moved its living collections at the Museum Support Center (MSC) in Suitland, Maryland, to a temporary greenhouse. In February 2023 the 28-year-old Botany Research Greenhouse was razed for the construction of Pod 6. The new replacement greenhouse is under construction at MSC with occupancy scheduled for September 2023.

Top: The new Department of Botany greenhouse under construction, April 2023. The new headhouse sits on left, the new greenhouse foundation is in the middle, and the temporary greenhouse is on right.
Bottom left: Razing of old greenhouse, February 16, 2023.
Bottom right: Interior temporary greenhouse with Botany living collections, April 2023.
(all photos by Ken Wurdack)

Diving into the green algae of Puerto Rico

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

A new taxonomic study of the benthic species of green algae known from Puerto Rico has recently been released. “The marine benthic algal flora of Puerto Rico, II. Chlorophyta and Prasinodermatophyta” by David L. Ballantine, James N. Norris, and Hector Ruiz was published in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany, No. 117.

Illustration of Udotea flabellum, a benthic algal species generally found in sandy, shallow-water habitats to 10 m depths as well as in offshore algal plains throughout the Caribbean Sea.

This treatment covers the two phyla, eight orders, 25 families, 50 genera, and 150 species of green algae that occur in the benthic marine communities in Puerto Rico. The study includes information on type locality, distribution, habitat, descriptive accounts of anatomy, taxonomic status, and an image or illustration of most species. One feature of this series that stands out is the quality of illustrations due to many in situ habit photos by co-author Ruiz.

Puerto Rico is the eastern-most island of the Greater Antilles and defines the northern boundary of the Caribbean Sea, thus the north coast borders the Atlantic Ocean while the remaining coasts face the Caribbean.

The marine algal flora of Puerto Rico has been intensively studied, with reports dating back to the 1800s, and has the best-known algal flora of any island or island group in the region. This is especially true of its deep-water flora that has been the subject of extensive exploration by submarine, dredging, scuba, and technical diving. David Ballantine spent most of his 37-year professional career teaching and studying algae as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and his long-time collaborators James Norris (curator emeritus NMNH) and Hector Ruiz (HJR Reefscaping, an environmental consulting group) are coauthoring an entire series including brown, green, and red algae.

This volume represents the second installment of the expected four-part series. Parts I and II feature the brown algae and green algae, respectively. The red algae are an especially large and diverse group; thus, Part III will be issued in two volumes.

A new genomic resource available for Annonaceae

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

Cherimoya (Annona cherimola) has been an appreciated food source since Pre-Columbian times in the Americas. Although it is currently considered an underutilized fruit crop, it is still important at the local level in several regions of Central and South America. It is commercially cultivated in several countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and USA (California), among others, and has a clear niche for expansion in regions with subtropical climates. It belongs to the Annonaceae, the largest family on the Magnoliid clade, sister to the eudicot and monocot clades of angiosperms. But, unfortunately, the progress on cherimoya breeding is hindered by the little genetic and genomic information available, which is a critical bottleneck for breeding, selection, diversification, conservation, and evolutionary studies not only of cherimoya but also in other species in the Annonaceae.

Annona cherimola tree, flower, and fruit morphology. (a) Pruned tree; (b) leaves; (c) female stage of the flower; (d) male stage of the flower; (e) fruit; (f) open fruit. (photos by Alicia Talavera; images from Plants People Planet, doi:

In a recently published paper in Plants People Planet (doi: 10.1002/ppp3.10366), Smithsonian Botany postdoctoral fellow Alicia Talavera, researchers Noé Fernandez-Pozo, Antonio J. Matas Arroyo, and professor Iñaki Hormaza from Instituto de Hortofruticultura Subtropical y Mediterránea La Mayora (IHSM La Mayora-UMA-CSIC), Málaga, Spain in collaboration with Aureliano Bombarely from Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, IBMCP (CSIC-UPV), Valencia, Spain have provided an important resource to fill this knowledge gap, a chromosome-scale genome sequence, which is available at the IHSM subtropicals database, https://ihsmsubtropicals.uma.es/easy_gdb/index.php.