From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.
For over 27 years, outstanding college-students from around the world have been specially selected to pursue scientific research at NMNH in the ten-week summer Research Training Program (RTP). Fourteen students were chosen from a field of 130 applicants to participate in RTP 2007, and seventeen NMNH research scientists agreed to serve as their research advisers. Hailing from five countries: Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, and the United States, and pursuing a variety of research projects ranging from investigating the oxidation of the Earth’s mantle to studying the gland morphology of foam-nesting frogs to examining the co-evolution of Heliconia and hummingbirds to deriving Native American trade routes by analyzing iron meteoritic Hopewell beads, this elite group of students has welcomed inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural exchange. Three of the 14 students are pursuing research projects in the Department of Botany.
Emma Harrower is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying Plant Biology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Harrower is researching the population genetics and taxonomy of Muhlenbergia montana and M. filiculmis with Paul Peterson. These two sister species of grasses have very similar morphologies, although the former species has shorter, involute, and sharp-pointed leaf blades, and shorter spikelets with short-awned lemmas. Muhlenbergia montana is ecologically a dominant component of grasslands found in the southwestern United States, throughout Mexico, and the highlands of Guatemala. Muhlenbergia filiculmis is restricted to the southern Rocky Mountains in the United States where it occurs on similar habitats at higher elevations. Harrower hopes to clarify taxonomical differences between M. montana and M. filiculmis by studying macromorphological characters. She will also look at the genetic diversity within and among 15 populations of M. montana and M. filiculmis using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). The geographic locations of 100 vouchers of M. filiculmis and M. montana will be mapped to show distribution patterns.
Laura Lagomarsino, from Sacramento, California, is a fourth-year Genetics and Plant Biology major at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley, she is reconstructing the phylogeny of Heliconia using molecular data under the guidance of Department of Botany alum Chelsea Specht. This summer, she is working under W. John Kress on a project entitled “Phylogeny, Floral Evolution, and Co-Radiation with Hummingbird Pollinators in Heliconia subgenus Heliconia (Heliconiaceae).” The project involves collecting additional DNA sequence data to gain better support for the phylogeny so that comparative phylogenetic methods can be used to detect evolutionary trends and patterns within a subgenus of Heliconia. Morphological characters relevant to pollination biology, such as floral curvature, nectar chamber size, and flower color, are going to be measured for this purpose because it is hypothesized that speciation in the group was greatly influenced by pollinator selection. Additionally, a parallel phylogeny of hummingbirds will be used to assess the possibility of a tight co-evolution between Heliconia and their pollinators.
Cecily Marroquin is an intern from Los Alamos, New Mexico. She is currently a rising sophomore at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she is double majoring in Anthropology and Journalism/Mass Communications. Marroquin is working with Alain Touwaide on the project: Quantifying Diseases in Societies without Epidemiological Record: a Methodological Essay. The project is an approach to help determine the epidemiology of the Old World. Although the predecessors of modern medicine such as Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen recorded the uses and benefits of therapeutics, they left little trace of the period’s population health. Due to many difficulties, the best way to uncover the epidemiology would be by analyzing information from the ancient texts. By quantifying the amount of therapeutic agents available, a conclusion can be made on the diseases prevalent under the assumption that the more frequent a disease is, the more medicines there will be to treat it. In order to verify the assumption, the project analyzes the epidemiology of the 20th century, a well recorded time period, to make the correlation between disease and therapeutic agents. Marroquin is taking the frequency of the diseases mentioned in important therapeutic references (specifically all editions of Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics) and comparing the most mentioned diseases to the leading causes of death throughout the entirety of the century. If a correlation can be made, a model will be built to help recover the epidemiology of the Old World.
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