The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Zizania aquatica L.

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 2024.

The 21^st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “Advancing Plant Conservation Through Horticulture,” was held on May 17, 2024. Among the talks was one about conservation action for crop wild relatives. In 1997, Alice Tangerini illustrated this image of Zizania aquatica, southern wild-rice, an important constituent of aquatic plant communities of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast Plains. While not cultivated, Z. aquatica has been grown experimentally. This illustration appeared in Terrell, et al. (SIDA 17: 533-549; 1997). Tangerini made all of her sketches from Ed Terrel’s collections that were collected in Georgia in the early 1970s.  Terrel asked for the usual full size habit and inflorescence but also wanted the details of the spikelet and caryopsis. Tangerini immersed some caryopses of the Zizania in a Petri dish of water and set it on her hot plate to boil so the features would be more discernible. Forgetting this was a grain that people normally cook and eat, she returned later to find a dish of cooked rice ready to eat.

Staff Activities [video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 2024.

John Kress presented a lecture, "Art meets Science: How artists and botanists capture the essence of Nature through color, composition, and classification," at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, on June 26, 2024. In his talk, he described how artists and botanists have made unanticipated contributions to both our understanding and appreciation of the natural world for hundreds of years and how it continues today. His talk showed several artworks in the Department of Botany’s art collection, including Bryan Poole’s Heliconia caribaea, and Alice Tangerini’s gingers, including Globba sherwoodiana. Tangerini and her intern, Michelle-Marie Nelson were in attendance, and then following the lecture, Tangerini spoke to several of the attendees about her work at the museum.

In April 2024, Alice Tangerini spent time in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the Springfield Museums as an invited guest through Smithsonian Affiliates to present a lecture on “Botanical Illustration Then and Now” and to teach a class in botanical illustration. From April 4-7, Springfield Museums held a Festival of Flowers at their five museums all centered around a green quadrangle which featured sculptures of characters in the Dr. Seuss stories. Three of the museums displayed amazing flower arrangements in front of art pieces that were the inspiration for the designs. Other museums displayed floral arrangements in front of dioramas of animals and prehistoric life. One museum held activities for children and flower arranging for adults. Tangerini worked with Clarissa Leverich, the Museum School and Lecture Coordinator, to organize the class. Participants created layered graphite and watercolor flower portraits using prints and live flowers for subjects. It was a unique method for students to learn and each student came away with a finished piece.

On April 18, in celebration of Earth Day 2024, alumni of the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellowship program presented short talks related to their own science journeys in the symposium, “Life on a Sustainable Planet: Exploring and Understanding Our Natural World”. The symposium offered an opportunity for the Smithsonian science community and the public to hear from science leaders of the future on how their work is contributing to exploring and understanding our natural world. Among the speakers, Richie Hodel presented, “Machine learning applications with digitized herbarium specimens reveal the hybrid origin of the cherry/plum genus,” and Manuela Dal Forno presented, “Preserving the past, exploring the future: Insights from historical lichen collections.” All of the talks were recorded and are available for viewing on the museum's YouTube channel.

Richie Hodel presents, “Machine learning applications with digitized herbarium specimens reveal the hybrid origin of the cherry/plum genus”:

 

Manuela Dal Forno presents, “Preserving the past, exploring the future: Insights from historical lichen collections”:

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 2024.

Lucy Anderson is an undergraduate NHRE intern working in Botany this summer. She is a Plant Biology major at the Pennsylvania State University interested in plant genomics, systematics, and conservation. She is working on a continuation of a project with Warren Wagner, Jun Wen, and Gabe Johnson to further resolve the phylogeny of Fuchsia and Circaea (Onagraceae) to better understand their evolutionary and biogeographical origins and diversification. At Penn State, Anderson is also a research assistant at the Schatz Center for Tree Molecular Genetics where she studies seed morphology of imperiled Black Ash.

Destiny Brokaw is a Ph.D. student in Biological Sciences at Washington State University. Destiny previously received her master's in plant pathology from Auburn University and her bachelor's in biology from Abilene Christian University. Her research aims to understand the diversification of Hawaiian Cyrtandra across the Hawaiian Islands using hyb-seq high throughput sequencing approaches. Brokaw is working in collaboration with Warren Wagner, Jun Wen, and Gabe Johnson to thoroughly sample morphological and geographical variation of Cyrtandra across the Hawaiian Islands for DNA extractions. Destiny will utilize DNA sequences to obtain a genus-wide phylogeny of Hawaiian Cyrtandra and will further assess the influence of extensive hybridization between species. More information and updates on Brokaw's research can be found on her website at <https://destinybrokaw.weebly.com/>.

Alberto J. Coello started as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in April 2024 in the NMNH Department of Botany. Working with Jun Wen, he uses phylogenomic approaches to unveil the pantropical biogeographic pattern of Cissus, the largest genus of the grape family (Vitaceae). Coello studied the colonization of plants in oceanic archipelagos during his doctoral work at the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, Spain, focused on Canarian species. After completing his Ph.D., he conducted research on the conservation of Cistus heterophyllus, one of the most endangered plant species in Spain, while at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena. More recently, he studied spatial phylogenetics of the angiosperm Iberian flora while working at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research interests include biogeography, phylogenomics, dispersal, and evolution.

Asia Hightower, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, joined Botany this summer as a Smithsonian Big Ten Alliance Predoctoral fellow. She is working under the supervision of Jun Wen, Alex White, and Greg Stull. Her dissertation work focuses on leaf shape morphometrics and the environmental and genetic factors that influence leaf shape in Capsella bursa-pastoris, a weedy sister species to Arabidopsis thaliana. At the Smithsonian, she is working on the morphometric and genetic differences in leaf shape between members of the Brassicaceae supertribe Camelinodae using machine learning of specimens collected from across the U.S. She has broad interests in plant developmental and evolutionary biology. She also has interests in science communication, community engagement, and outreach.

Michelle-Marie Nelson joined the department as a summer intern under the supervision of Alice Tangerini, June through early August. Nelson has a Certificate in Botanical Art & Illustration and a degree in Native Plants from the North Carolina Botanical Gardens, and she has taken several courses in herbalism and permaculture. Nelson is helping with scanning, mounting drawings, and organizing the Botanical Art Collection. She is also working on an illustration for the type of Laciasis for a botanist from Italy. This request came through Research Associate Rob Soreng.

Luke Sparreo is returning to work with Jun Wen this summer after joining the lab last summer as part of the NHRE internship program. Sparreo recently graduated from Connecticut College and will begin his Ph.D. studies in Plant Science through the City University of New York (CUNY) and the New York Botanical Garden this fall. In Wen's lab, Sparreo is studying the origin of the Norton grape cultivar. Developed in Virginia in the early 19^th century, the Norton grape was one of the first celebrated American wines and interest in the cultivar remains today. Despite its importance, little is known about the cultivar’s ancestry. Sparreo is sequencing DNA from both the Norton cultivar and possible wild Vitis parent species as well as examining the cultivar using morphometric analyses to help determine the origin of the Norton cultivar.

Brooklyn Swen, an undergraduate Biological Sciences major at the Pennsylvania State University, joined Botany this summer as an NHRE intern working under the supervision of Jun Wen and Gabe Johnson. Her project focuses on the phylogenomic analysis of the canyon grape species complex, Vitis arizonica, found in southwestern U.S. Morphologically, the species complex exhibits variability depending on the regions in which they occur, including the lobing and pubescence of the leaves, variations in the small clusters of fruits, and seed morphology. The overall objective of her project is to utilize DNA sequencing to construct a phylogenomic framework to analyze the clustering of clades and to observe morphological patterns of similarities, differences, and geographic distribution.