Mimbulus Mimbletonia

The DNA sequencing results all came back, so for the past two weeks, I've mostly been working on this program called GeneMarker that takes all of the DNA sequencing results and spits out the allele sizes at the EST/microsatellite marker loci as peaks on a graph. Here's a screenshot of a couple of GeneMarker graphs:

So the peaks portray how many base pairs long different alleles are. However, it's not as easy as it sounds because there are deceitful little peaks that try to trick you into believing that they're real - but really, they're just imposters... Anyway, I've been trying to tackle this program, but it's been putting up a good fight. But I'm determined to conquer it…somehow…

In the greenhouse, I'm still monitoring the germination and flowering of the M. tilingii and M. guttatus; however, many of the tilingii were looking slightly puny, so we ended up replanting some of them.

But thankfully, some of the paired guttatus individuals started flowering, and I began taking down morphological data. We decided on comparing and contrasting flowering time, basal width, overall height, number of vegetative stems, stem thickness between different nodes, internode lengths, leaf length/width, corolla length/width, stigma length, anther length, calyx length/width, and number of flowers after a certain time period.

We're also planning on measuring stomatal density and perhaps (hopefully, if all goes well) trichome density/morphology. Measuring these two traits is really interesting! So for stomatal density, you take casts of the underside of leaves using dental impression material and stick it on a microscope slide. When that dries, you spread some clear nail polish on the casts and make leaf impressions from the nail polish peels. You put those peels on another microscope slide and examine it under a microscope, and you can see individual plant cells, including the guard cells that control stomatal opening/closing! Super cool! Also, I've been wanting to examine more closely the tiny little hair-like structures that are found on both the tilingii and guttatus. Here's an amazing picture of a tilingii individual in which the trichomes are really easy to see (taken by Carrie):

Amazingly, some of the tilingii populations (like this one) have a sticky substance on their trichomes. It's hypothesized that this glandular exudate is a mechanism for resistance to insect herbivory, insulation, etc. Anyway, we looked at the trichomes on both the tilingii and guttatus and discovered that for the individuals that we examined, the trichome morphology was different between the two species

Oh, and I almost forgot! I was reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and there's this part that describes a plant that Neville has called "Mimbulus mimbletonia". Doesn't "mimbulus" sound eerily similar to "mimulus"? Anyway, I looked it up on Wikipedia:

"Mimbulus mimbletonia is described as "appear[ing] to be a small grey cactus in a pot, except that it was covered with what looked like boils rather than spines" (OotP 186). The genus name mimbulus may be related to the real genus mimulus, especially since those plants are used as folk remedies for "shyness, anxiety, and forgetfulness" and those are traits of Neville Longbottom."

Mimulus are definitely not small grey cacti, but I thought that was a cool coincidence. Now whenever I go to the greenhouse, I feel like I'm in Professor Sprout's class! =]