Pictures!

Here is Miss Sally and my new van! She, Mr W and I will go camping Saturday night somewhere close. I think it will be a matter of driving up to the area, and seeing what's open, as the reservation system wants one to make the reservation 4 days or more in advance.

Here's my raised beds this morning. The large green presence in the lower right corner was labeled as "Broccoli" - can anyone confirm my suspicion that these are Brussels sprouts? I need to head to the nursery this weekend to fill in just a couple of spots, and then I think I'm done. This has been my first year growing greens, and I wish I had planted more.

And, finally, my own personal hybrid zone! I studied native plant hybridization when I was in school, and, while these Penstemmon aren't native, they have hybridized and are slowly taking over the front garden, which I will gladly allow. The previous owners of my house planted them, and I think started with a dark blue, a pink, and a white on the other side that's out of the picture. Now there are plants with a range of pinks and purples - it's cool to see how it changes a little each year.

Hybridization or Contamination?

I'm starting a new project at work today. It's the one that my coworker, out on medical leave, was to start and it got passed to me. The work isn't technically difficult, consisting of cloning and sequencing a region of ribosomal DNA, but I haven't done much of it yet, so will be well-versed in that by the time I'm done.

We're looking for evidence of hybridization between two species, P and R, that aren't supposed to hybridize.

Although we are starting with a region of ribosomal DNA, my feeling is that we'll need to look at other markers as well. Some specimens, morphologically, have looked "funny" to my boss, but he ID'd those as R. I can remember when he made his comment a couple of years ago, and of course my first question was, "do P and R ever hybridize?" At the time, he said, emphatically, "no". Then we found several instances, then several instances more once we started looking for them, of individuals who showed both diagnostic bands for both species on our species-level screening PCR.

So the plan is to sequence the ribosomal DNA of 5 individuals that showed both bands and that had their morphology examined by an expert (my boss). 3 were ID'd morphologically as P, and 2 as R. We'll run our panel of microsatellite markers on them as well. I did a small sample (1 per family, 48 families) of R, just to see what their microsatellite profiles would look like. I got about 20% with P profiles.

It's a cool conundrum. Stay tuned.

My Own Personal Hybrid Zone

I studied plant hybridization in school, and from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's a fascinating phenomenon because of the tie-ins to speciation and adaptation. Novel combinations of genes are produced via hybridization, and those new combos may be just what's needed to adapt to a new habitat. Add the elements of time and some isolation and it can lead to new species.

Unlike zoologists, botanists aren't quite as hung up on whether "good" species (i.e. "real" species) need to be completely reproductively isolated from each other. In other words, two groups of organisms can be valid species based on genetics, or ecological factors, and yet (oops, I had this wrong in the previous draft) hybridize to produce fertile offspring. Often the hybridization comes as a secondary thing, and more often these days, from human disturbance that makes some sort of bridge that brings formerly isolated species together.

When I bought my house in 2005, the sellers had put in a nice little front garden, and landscaped it with xeriscaping species. The plants have largely performed as advertised, I don't water it much, and it looks nice. They planted three kinds of Penstemon, and those have really done well. So much so that I have my own hybrid zone, where parental species, as well as intermediates can be seen.

My camera, sadly, is at my brother's house in MN, so I can't take a picture, but these pictures, from the fabulous Wayne's Word website give you the idea. Notice how F1s (that's "first filial generation, or the first hybrid offspring of pure parents) are a nice 50:50 split. It's not always that clean, but gives bumbling scientists a clue that hybridization is occurring. Then, as hybrids cross with hybrids, and hybrids backcross to parents ("BCs"), you can get a wide variety of forms, and presumably different abilities to adapt to environmental conditions.

How do these biological mix ups occur? Well, you can blame it on the pollinators, who work a patch of flowers and end up transferring pollen between species. That's exactly how it looks in my garden, where there are plants with blue flowers, and pink flowers (who, of course aren't going to change, as they are perennials), and then the intermediate flowers have combinations of blue and pink. Maybe I'll get a cool new Penstemon variety I can propagate.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!!