Tag: herbariumPage 5 of 6

First report from Indonesia

A team of five staff from RBGE (three scientists and two horticulturists) have set out on an expedition to Indonesia; Phase 1 of a project which aims to…

In the footsteps of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In amongst the institutional archives of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh are items relating to the teaching of botany here, including lists of students going back to 1798. …

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…

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…

Battle of Loos, 25th September 1915

In memory of Lance Corporal William F. Bennett (1889-1915), Private Alan Menzies (1894-1915), Lance Corporal John Stewart (1891-1915) and Private George H. Stuart (1891-1915) In August 1914, RBGE…

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 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…

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….

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…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. V. Fragmenting the DNA

The mantra for many years for next generation sequencing has been, like “garbage in, garbage out”, that the optimal starting point is high quality, high molecular weight DNA….

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. IV. DNA

In March this year, having already chosen and obtained the plant material that we were going to use for our NBAF project on using a hybrid bait protocol…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. III. The Samples.

Having chosen Inga umbellifera as the study organism for our NBAF-funded project to test the use of hybrid baits for recovery of DNA sequences from herbarium material, we…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. II. Inga.

About 300 species of Inga (Leguminosae: Mimosoideae: Ingeae) grow in lowland and montane rain forest throughout the humid tropical zone, from Mexico to Uruguay. Most species diversity is…

Capturing Genes from Herbaria. I. What it’s all about.

In February this year, Dr Catherine Kidner, Dr Michelle Hart, Dr James Nicholls and I were awarded an NBAF pilot grant by NERC to explore the use of…

New to Science 2015 – Mimulus peregrinus

The New to Science blog is a regular post about new plant species as they are being named, described and published for the first time. The only requirements…

Sutton’s vasculum of grasses and seeds

A conversation in the canteen about a 19th wheat specimen from Nepal led on to Henry Noltie asking if I had seen the amazing box of grasses. The…

The plant hunt goes on, and it’s turned digital!

George Forrest was a prolific plant hunter; it’s estimated that here in the herbarium there are around 31,000 pressed plant specimens collected by Forrest and his team of…

Natures Beloved Son – rediscovering John Muir’s botanical legacy

A new exhibition, Natures Beloved Son, featuring the herbarium and words of pioneering conservationist John Muir, opened recently in the John Hope Gateway. The plants featured were found…