The current Next Gen Sequencing lab project at the Botanics involves looking at the phylogeny of Polytrichum section Polytrichum, using hybrid capture.

Polytrichum commune, photographed by David Bell (David Bell 1422) in Peebleshire

The work will form part of Sri Lankan student Isuru Kariyawasam’s PhD research. Isuru’s project is supervised by Dr Neil Bell and Dr Catherine Kidner.

An initial hybrid bait set of 800 nuclear loci has come from collaborators Prof. Bernard Goffinet (University of Connecticut), Dr Matt Johnson (Texas Tech University), Dr Rafael Medina (Augustana College, Illinois), and Dr Yang Liu (Fairy Lake Botanical Garden, Shenzhen).

As a first step, we are planning to make a small number of libraries from Polytrichaceae species, and run their post-capture DNA on a MiSeq in order to generate read data from the family that can be used to design a better-targeted Polytrichaceae-specific bait set.

Most of the taxa in the study will be sampled from herbarium specimens.