Tag: BryophytePage 3 of 3
Although the exact relationships between the earliest land plant lineages are not yet well resolved, there is consensus that liverworts are one of the most ancient land plant…
One of the earliest plastid genomes to be sequenced, in the late 1980s (Ohyama et al.), was that of Marchantia polymorpha, one of the commonest liverworts around town,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Twenty-five participants from 13 countries have just attended a symposium on complex thalloid liverworts in Edinburgh #Marchantia2015. The meeting also included two teleconferences (from Australia, John Bowman, Monash…
What sorts of features provide the best clues about whether or not two plants are closely related? Sometimes it’s obvious – most people can correctly recognise a daffodil…
The complex thalloid liverworts, or Marchantiopsida, are one of the oldest land plant lineages, and contain a bewildering array of morphologies, ranging from comparatively simple plants like Blasia,…
Discovery of a plant previously unknown in an area is not what you might expect to happen within a botanic garden. Such places have large managed collections of…
In May, Scotland published its first Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme – a set of actions to increase Scotland’s resilience to the impacts of a changing climate. RBGE…
We are hosting a small two-day workshop at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh on the 11th-12th September 2014 to discuss issues around morphologically cryptic species, whether we can…
As a follow-on to my post about why bryophytes are important is this thoughtful piece by Dr Janice Glime, author of the comprehensive and freely downloadable book Bryophyte…
As someone who has used taxpayers’ money to fund research on bryophytes (the collective term for mosses, liverworts and hornworts), ‘But why do bryophytes actually matter?’ is one…