Site for Sori

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Land plants are a large group of around 400,000 named species that include all of the flowering plants, conifers, ferns, mosses, and their relatives. Land plants are responsible for producing the oxygen we breath on Earth, and they dominate all terrestrial habitats. Ferns are a group of land plants with about 11,000 species, and they are important members of the global plant community. One interesting aspect of fern biology is that many fern species are known to be polyploid. You probably learned about genes and DNA in a biology class – genes code for and determine each aspect of an organism’s body. In humans, this includes things like our eye color, height, face shape, and pretty much every other feature that makes each person a unique individual. Humans have 46 chromosomes, with half of those (23) coming from the mother and half from the father. This condition, having two sets of chromosomes (one from Mom and one from Dad) is known as being diploid. This is the case for many organisms, including most animals and plants, in which sexual reproduction is the fusing of gametes (eggs and sperm) that each have just one set of parental chromosomes, resulting in an offspring that has two sets and is diploid (di- means “two”). However, many organisms (including some animals!) deviate from these rules and may have more than just two sets of chromosomes in their cells. These organisms are called polyploid (poly- means “multiple”), and it turns out that ferns are especially good at this. By some estimates, roughly 30% – that’s almost one out of every three! – fern species is polyploid instead of diploid.

In this project we are looking at ferns in the genus Asplenium, a group that contains both diploid and polyploid species. Scientists suspect that many aspects of a plant’s morphology – that is, how it looks – may be different between polyploids and diploids. We are measuring morphological characters such as leaf shape and length to see if there may be a difference in the morphology of diploid species compared to polyploid species. If we do find a connection between morphological and genetic features (the ploidy level), researchers will be better able to understand the effects of these chromosome-level changes on the biology of ferns, and how different species have adapted to survive in different habitats.