Category: SciencePage 29 of 36

Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Scientific progress, continental drift and glaciers: The history of a paper on the complex thalloid liverworts

Rather a while ago, back in 2003, we started working on a phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (as a Molecular Phylogenetics…

Plants from the Woods and Forests of Chile – linking our collections

To tie in with the launch of ‘Plants from the Woods and Forests of Chile’, we wanted to look at some of the material from our herbarium and…

Hidden diversity in unexpected places – moss growth on modern building surfaces

Back in 2014, staff in the molecular lab and herbarium at RBGE greatly enjoyed a three-week visit from Austrian Dr Wolfgang Hofbauer. With funding from the EU SYNTHESYS…

Carex on Herbaria@Home

RBGE has recently started to explore the use of Citizen Science platforms by providing images and data to Herbaria@Home, a long standing and successful platform for transcribing herbarium…

First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail

Apps Apps Apps For several years now we have been looking for a way to make appropriate use of mobile phones to deliver interpretation material. Smart phones really…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. IX. Hybrid capture

By mid-May 2015, we had 32 separate Inga umbellifera libraries, 15 generated using the Illumina Tru-Seq Nano library preparation kits, and 17 with the NEBNext Ultra library preparation…

Finding Monocarpus, in the field

Sadly, although not surprisingly, I was not able to amplify the regions of Monocarpus DNA needed to compare it to other complex thalloid liverworts from a 1950s collection that we had…

Where the Tropics meet the Arctic – Scotland

Some of the most remote and beautiful wilderness landscapes in Scotland are in the extreme north-west, in Sutherland, so-called from the Vikings who regarded it as the south…

John Hutton Balfour Excursions

“Excursions may be truly said to be the life of the botanist. They enable him to study the science practically, by the examination of plants in their living state, and…

Biography of John Hutton Balfour

John Hutton Balfour Born: 15 September 1808 Place of Birth: Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh Died: 11 February 1884 Place of Death: Inverleith House, Edinburgh Occupation: Botanist and Teacher The…

Finding Monocarpus, in the herbarium

At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh we’ve been working on the phylogeny of the complex thalloid liverworts for rather a while now. David Long presented a poster on…

On Monocarpus

As far as liverworts go, Monocarpus is a rather strange plant. It’s very small, in itself not that unusual for a bryophyte, but rather problematic if you need…

Dry tropical forest movie making

  Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests are found throughout Latin America from Mexico to south-western Brazil and northern Argentina. Dry forest is the world’s most threatened tropical forest due to…

300,000 specimens imaged and online!

Yesterday saw the 300,000th specimen from our herbarium collection imaged and made available on our website. This is a big milestone for the digitisation programme, which has been…

Wartime Rhododendron

  In the Autumn of 1914, George Forrest was travelling in China. His letters written at the time mention the difficulties he was facing in getting permission to…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. VIII. Amplification

Both the Tru-Seq and NEB libraries were amplified pre-hybrid capture – another step at which modifications were made, according to how much DNA there was in each library….

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. VII. Comparisons.

As previously mentioned, we tested two different kits in our NBAF project. The first is the Illumina Tru-Seq Nano library preparation kit (FC-121-4001), which recommends a starting DNA…

Amorphophallus titanum – Preserving it for posterity

The flowering of our Amorphophallus titanum (titan arum) was a tremendous event with c 19,000 people visiting the Glasshouses to see the plant growing from a small bud…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. VI. Size selection

A few days ago, I read a tweet from the Botany2015 meeting in Alberta that described DNA extracted from herbarium specimens as “pre-sheared”. This resonates with our own…