Now that the lab is growing, we’ve started holding lab meetings.  I’m adapting a favorite tradition from my days in the Kingsley lab - “Bone of the Week” - to be incorporated into our lab meetings.  Since I now study plant genetics rather than vertebrate genetics, we’re calling it “Bloom of the Week”.  Every week, one lab member gets five minute to talk about something fun--plant, gene, finding, historical figure, etc--to add extra “Isn’t science cool?!” edu-tainment to the proceedings.  The plan is to share these here with short blurbs on the website too.

I kicked off this week by talking about Mimulus peregrinus, a newly described a very very very recently evolved allopolyploid species.  Several Mimulus species are invasive in the British Isles, introduced only about 140 years ago.  Over that short time period, Mimulus guttatus (2n) and a polyploid Mimulus species (4n) have been hybridizing to make triploid (3n) offspring that are sterile but persist through vegetative reproduction.  Mario Vallejo-Marin at University of Stirling has discovered fertile 6n allotetraploids amidst one of these triploid populations, which likely arose by genome doubling and are distinguished by their chromosome content, pollen size and stomata size from the triploids.  Polyploidy is often called “instant speciation”, and this appears to be a very good case of observing that process in action.  --Ben Blackman