The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Stachycephalum asplundii H.Rob. & Tangerini

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

Illustration of Stachycephalum asplundii by Alice Tangerini

When Alice Tangerini was examining plant specimens for a series of Stachycephalum (Asteraceae) illustrations in 2006, she discovered some interesting features of the achene on a particular specimen. Her observations did not agree with what Harold Robinson had asked her to draw. Robinson concluded that the species that Tangerini was drawing was a new species. To give credit where credit is due, Robinson added Tangerini’s name as plant author with his. Stachycephalum asplundii H.Rob. & Tangerini is published in Flora of Ecuador 77(2): 125-127; fig. 55) (2006). The species is found in the Ecuadorian province of Napo, in the Rio Cosanga valley.

David Kenfack elected as a Fellow to the African Academy of Sciences

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

David Kenfack, ForestGEO staff scientist, has been elected as a Fellow to the African Academy of Sciences. This distinguished membership recognizes African scientists who have “attained the highest level of excellence in their scientific field and have made significant contributions to the advancement of science regionally and globally.” Begun in 1986, there are now more than 400 Fellows in the African Academy of Sciences.

David Kenfack

Kenfack is currently the coordinator of ForestGEO’s Africa Program and is a principal investigator of the Korup (Cameroon), Mpala (Kenya), and Ngel Nyaki (Nigeria) plots.

He was born in Bafou, Cameroon and completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Yaoundé (1984-1995). In 1996, he was hired as a field manager for the first census of the Korup 50-ha plot. In 2002, he moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Upon obtaining his degree in 2008, he began a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2008-2009). Between 2010 and 2012 he served as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, and in 2012 he was hired as the Africa Program coordinator for the ForestGEO network. In 2016 he became a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute staff scientist.

Kenfack describes his work saying, “I use a combination of morphological, molecular, ecological and spatial data to explore plant groups with challenging taxonomy to understand their evolutionary history and biogeography.” He has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications.

The African Academy of Sciences’ announcement of its 2019 class of fellows has been posted at https://www.aasciences.africa/news/african-academy-sciences-announces-election-2019-fellows.

János Xántus, a 19th century collector

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

By Julia Beros.

“There are thousands and thousands of ways to dig out a little plant, even if one has to resort to digging with his own nails,” such is the acumen of János Xántus, rather John Xantus, or perhaps Louis Vesey, or potentially and more accurately, J. Xántus de Vesey. A man enrobed by myth and lore Xántus was a famed Hungarian lawyer, then Lieutenant and then exile, but foremost a self-taught collector of plants and animals who contributed to the foundations of the Smithsonian Institution and the namesake to many novel species. Depending on where you look for information he is described as a zoologist, or an ornithologist, a naturalist, but never defined as a botanist. In a recent publication in Ann. Mus. Hist. Nat. Hung. (111: 145-177; 2019) by Daniel Pifkó of the Hungarian Natural History Museum’s Botany Department, researchers endured a massive undertaking of finding and accurately cataloging Xántus’ early plant collections from the 1850s in North America, which were sent largely unidentified and with jumbled data, ultimately delivering clarity and placing his collections in context with its greater and mythic history.

Holotype of Mimosa xanti (Fabaceae) collected in Cape San Lucas, Mexico by János Xántus between August 1859 and January 1860.

Born in Hungary in 1825, Xántus finished his secondary schooling and promptly pursued a legal career. In 1848, the Hungarian Revolution spurred war and Xántus at age 23, equipped with cartographic skills, became a chief lieutenant. He was captured and sent to Austria to be enlisted in the army there, but was soon freed and while fleeing was arrested again in Prague, where he somehow escaped and absconded to the United States. Arriving with seven dollars, Xántus made a career of odd jobs, visiting different cities and leaving “after picking conflicts” with locals, and then enlisted in the U.S. army where his unlikely career in science began. Enlisting under the name “Louis Vesey” his first station was at Fort Riley in Kansas where he met William Alexander Hammond, military physician and neurologist who made a hobby of collecting biological specimens for naturalist friend Spencer Fullerton Baird (Smithsonian Curator who served as Assistant Secretary and then as the Smithsonian Institution’s 2^nd Secretary from 1878-87). The serendipity of this first assignment for Xántus gave him not only opportunity and motivation to collect biological specimens but training and mentorship from one of the world’s leading naturalists of the time as well. As one of Baird’s goals was to make the natural history collections more robust he was happy to enlist more collectors (keeping a vast list of contacts around the continent to solicit for collecting and sending material) and continue building the nation’s collections of a practically unstudied flora, essentially from scratch.

Notable women in science: Women of the United States National Herbarium

By Rose Gulledge.

March is Women's History Month. The Department of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium join our Federal partners in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance, and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.

Historically, botany has been one of the few attainable fields in science for women, most commonly in the areas of scientific illustration and field collection (assisting male botanists who oftentimes were their husbands). The twentieth century saw more women in the sciences including botany, with increasing numbers in curator and researcher positions despite being challenging to attain.

Mary Agnes Chase

Searching for “women in botany” is bound to yield a number of web pages on Mary Agnes Chase. Known for her work on the grasses at the United States National Herbarium (USNH), she did not start her career there, nor was she actually employed by the Smithsonian Institution.  This agrostologist (and suffragist) started her botany career at the United States Department of Agriculture as a Scientific Illustrator and worked her way up to Assistant Botanist. Her 1922 book, “The First Book of Grasses: The Structure of Grasses Explained for Beginners” was used to teach botany students in Latin America for years.  She worked at the USNH as an Honorary Custodian of the Grasses (not a curator) from 1936 until her death in 1963.  She became an Honorary Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution in 1959 at the age of 90.

Award & Honors

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

Warren Wagner

The National Museum of Natural History began awarding Science Achievement Awards in 2003. The awards recognize exceptional scientific publications in natural history. On November 18, 2020, in close consultation with the museum’s Senate of Scientists, an interdisciplinary review committee recognized the outstanding work of staff scientists for five scientific papers each published in 2018 and another set of five scientific papers and three books each published in 2019.

Among the awards, Jonathan Price and Warren Wagner received recognition for their 2018 paper, “Origins of the Hawaiian flora: Phylogenies and biogeography reveal patterns of long-distance dispersal” (J. Syst. Evol. 56(6): 600-620; https://doi.org/10.1111/jse.12465).

Molecular techniques in focus: Common misconceptions about tissue preservation for DNA

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

By Gabe Johnson.

Countless Ph.D. research botanists sincerely believe such misconceptions as: ethanol immediately destroys DNA in leaf tissue collections, leaves in both fresh and spent silica gel are equally dry, desiccated tissues rehydrate in absolute ethanol, and that EDTA inhibits all deoxyribonuclease (DNase) activity. Ethanol treatment of plant tissue for molecular studies is especially misunderstood by researchers in recent times, even though it can be a useful tool to improve DNA preservation for molecular studies. In this Information Age with the ability to sequence and process trillions of nucleotides of data in a single study, the capacity to isolate high quality DNAs must advance to utilize these new technologies to their fullest potential. Greater DNA quality and quantity are required for many of these next-generation sequencing methods than were necessary for traditional PCR-based Sanger methods. Obtaining sequenceable DNAs from a more complete taxonomic sampling will require an equally diverse set of DNA extraction tools, including ethanol preservation and pretreatment.

Biological tissues typically undergo a “treatment” such as freezing or drying prior to DNA extraction. The degree to which this treatment preserves the nucleic acid content of the leaf depends on the needs of the researcher and the logistical limitations of the field work. Such treatments can be as simple as allowing harvested leaves to dry in ambient conditions (usually with poor results) or the use of one of an array of desiccants, solvents, buffers, or cryogens (see Funk et al., Biodiversity Data J. 5: e11625; 2017). While a diversity of tissue treatment methods has been used to preserve DNA (i.e., Hamilton et al., Anal. Biochem. 49: 48-57; 1972), by the mid 1990’s silica gel desiccation was the default method for plant systematics studies (Chase et al., Taxon 40: 215-220; 1991). This preservation method has many virtues by being simple, inexpensive, non-toxic, and satisfactory for most major lineages of plants from algae to angiosperms, as well as fungi. However, the resulting DNA quality has limitations, and in particular is more fragmented than if extracted directly using fresh or frozen tissues.

Tissue from a collard leaf, Brassica oleracea L., is preserved in 96% ethanol to preserve DNA. (A) Since vascular tissue contains much less DNA per unit area, the large veins are removed. (B) Leaf lamina is quickly torn into ~1 cm2 pieces by hand. The ruler to the right is in cm. (C) Leaf fragments very easily fit into the mouth of a 50 mL conical vial. (D) The name of the plant and collection information is written in pencil on card stock and inserted into the vial; pencil writing does not dissolve away in ethanol. (E) To prevent excessive evaporation or accidental spills, the cap is sealed with parafilm. (F) The outside of the plastic vial is labeled with a special solvent resistant permanent marker. (G) Leaf fragments sink into the ethanol and chlorophyll leaches from tissues, leaving an off-white color. If the leaf fragments float and remain green after a couple hours, cut tissue into even smaller pieces. Adding isopropanol to the ethanol can also help. (photos by G. Johnson)

Just as DNA in herbarium specimens is better preserved for some lineages more than others, better DNA is extracted from silica dried tissues for certain taxa more than others. Tissue preservation media, dry or liquid, have a dual purpose: to protect the DNA within the tissue and to prepare the tissue for homogenization and efficient DNA isolation. Upon separation from the plant, a leaf undergoes a physiological stress response that initiates many cellular processes related to senescence: wound formation, polyphenol oxidation, and apoptosis. These cellular changes can rapidly degrade the DNA through programmed exonuclease activity and oxidative stress from reactive chemical species used in wound defense.

The 18th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, 13-14 May 2021, to explore plant symbioses

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

The Smithsonian’s Department of Botany and the United States Botanic Garden will hold the 2021 Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “Plant symbiosis: The good, the bad, and the complicated,” on 13-14 May 2021. Originally scheduled for May 2020 but canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this symposium will adapt to a virtual setting and be spread over two days.

Plants, like all organisms, exist in collaboration and competition with other life forms. As primary producers, plants form the basis of most food webs. In many cases they also depend on insects, vertebrate animals, bacteria, and/or fungi to survive and reproduce. Sometimes these interactions are especially close and long lasting and such symbioses are among the most fascinating relationships in the natural world. The 18^th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium will explore current research in the diversity of plant symbioses, examining the relationships plants have with insects, fungi, bacteria, and even other plants. Speakers will include botanists, ecologists, microbiologists, and geneticists whose research unravels the complicated relationships that plants have with their collaborators and competitors in the natural world.

In addition, the 18^th José Cuatrecasas Medal in Tropical Botany will be awarded at the Symposium. This prestigious award is presented annually to an international scholar who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. The award is named in honor of Dr. José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist who spent many years working in the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian and devoted his career to plant exploration in tropical South America.

Attendees will need to register online. Further details will be posted soon at https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany.