Proof that even immobile and silent things can be exciting
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Hi everyone! I'm Connie Wang, and I'm a rising senior at East Chapel Hill High School. In addition to participating in pretty much everything science related, I also spend a lot of time prepping for and competing in debate, my second love, as well as avoiding anything having to do with history. My summer's really hectic this year, but I always make time to watch So You Think You Can Dance and the occassional Food Network show :)
I'm completely psyched to be working in the Willis Lab for the next 6 weeks (the above cart label represents my thoughts pretty well), especially now that people are starting to return from their trips and the lab's starting to fill up. Everyone in the Willis Lab studies a genus of plants called Mimulus (monkeyflowers) in order to further understanding of evolution and speciation. Specifically, they work on a group of Mimulus species called the gutattus complex, which contains the most common monkeyflowers. Even within this group of closely related species, there are so many differences between the plants, in things as fundamental as whether the flowers are pollinated by bees or self-fertilized and whether they are perennial or annual. Plus the flowers are just so pretty, see?
This week, Carrie Wu and Jessica Selby have been showing me around the lab and getting me used to all the plants and building and lab equipment and whatnot. My favorite part is our workroom in the biology greenhouse - it smells SO GOOD. I thought it was just someone's perfume at first, but the smell has been there every day. It's like a nice apricot-y smell, I wish I could bottle it up and take it with me everyone I go haha. Strange part is, I smelled the flowers up close and they don't smell like anything. So I'm not sure what it is. Given the genetic diversity of Mimulus, I might've just smelled the wrong species or population or something, so it might actually be the flowers... if I get bored one day, I'll go around and sniff all of them and tell you guys where the smells coming from! Haha, trust me that was worth typing a paragraph about. Here are some nice pictures of Jessica (with Young Wha, another postdoc) at the computer and the biology greenhouse. I wish I could take a picture of the smell.
So this week was more of a learning week than one actually working on what my project will be - I planted seeds, transplanted tiny Mimulus sprouts, pruned plants, prepared primers, and collected samples from plants. I touched the plants a lot. Considering that I seem to be cursed with a black thumb (I managed to kill my aloe plant a couple years ago...) I really really hope that the plants are still okay... maybe by the end of the summer I'll get rid of that nasty curse. The first plant I buy will be another aloe. Even though I feel like I haven't done much constructive work on my project yet, I've learned a lot this week (and thought up a lot of questions that I'll probably forget about before I figure out the answer) from looking around. I noticed a lot of things about plants that I never would've noticed otherwise. The sprouts that I replanted were the cutest little things. While most of them had 2 cotyledons (Mimulus are dicots), there were a couple that had 3 and were triangle shaped. They were especially cute. I think they're like 4 leaf clovers, so I'm hoping they're lucky too. I took a picture of one, growing in slightly fungus-infested perlite, so maybe it'll bring you luck too:
This little baby Mimulus is the reason why the cuteness of plants is debateable. The "fuzzy" part is debatable because some of these things actually have slimy hair-like structures... so they look sorta fuzzy.
I'll most likely be paired with Jen M. a graduate student who's working on polyploidism in one species of Mimulus. For that reason, I went on a textbook/internet scavenger hunt about polyploidism today. That was when it became painfully clear that I'm a huge science nerd who gets excited by plants and enjoys reading textbooks about biology. Young Wha explained to me some stuff about polyploidism and I'm sure my entire face lit up. Basically, you can create new species of plants in the lab with a chemical that duplicates the original plant's set of chromosomes - how cool is that?? Jen is trying to figure out whether one species of Mimulus is actually an allotetraploid hybrid of 2 other related species, and to be honest, I'm not really sure how that relates to anything yet. I just know that it's supercool that she's created polyploid Mimulus in lab before. Oh man I'm so excited, I hope I get to do that.
With all the fun I've had this week, there was one disappointment - monkeyflowers don't actually look anything like monkeys. Seriously, what were the namers thinking? However, the lab did have a whiteboard, on which someone posted a little cut-out picture, colored with a crayon, of a monkey flower that looks like a monkey. It's the only one.
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