Highlights

The delicate stalk and pretty white flowers of Triantha occidentalis may seem like the perfect place to perch if you’re an insect, but get trapped in its sticky hairs and it will suck the nutrients from your dead corpse. That’s the surprising new finding by University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, detailed in PNAS. Triantha – a species of false asphodel – is the first new carnivorous plant to be identified by botanists in 20 years. It is notable for the unusual way it traps prey with sticky hairs on its flowering stem. “Carnivorous plants have fascinated people since the Victorian era […]

Article by: Miranda Meents (Lacey Samuels lab) 2015 is somewhat of an anniversary in cell biology. 350 years ago, Robert Hooke published the first description of what he called a cell. But it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that we started to look inside cells.  Then, in 1898, the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi first described, and gave his name to, a cell structure that is the hero of this story, the Golgi Apparatus. We now know that the Golgi is a stack of flattened compartments like a stack of pita bread. Inside the pita pockets hundreds of chemical reactions occur as the […]

Viruses and bacteria fall back to Earth via dust storms and precipitation. 2011 dust storm in the Sahara. An astonishing number of viruses are circulating around the Earth’s atmosphere – and falling from it – according to new research from scientists in Canada, Spain and the U.S. The study marks the first time scientists have quantified the viruses being swept up from the Earth’s surface into the free troposphere, that layer of atmosphere beyond Earth’s weather systems but below the stratosphere where jet airplanes fly. The viruses can be carried thousands of kilometres there before being deposited back onto the Earth’s […]

An international team of researchers have completed a massive effort to sequence genes from more than 1,100 plant species—an undertaking that saw UBC botanists collect rare mosses from remote corners of BC, and travel to the South Pacific to collect parasitic plants. “One of the crucial samples we wanted to include was a parasitic conifer shrub, Parasitaxus, which lives by feeding off fungi and another conifer,” says UBC botanist Sean Graham, who coordinated collection of 300 species for the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative (1KP). “Instead of using sunlight to fix energy through photosynthesis, it behaves like a plant vampire.” It was […]

For most of us, microbes mean only one thing: disease. Disease-causing microbes are actually the extreme minority of the most abundant form of life on Earth. But because of their immediate and direct importance to our health, they are much better studied than the rest of the microbial world. Still, new discoveries about the basic biology and evolution of some of the most infamous pathogens can throw us a curveball. My lab works on the evolution of apicomplexans, a diverse group of parasites that can only survive by infecting and living inside animal cells. For every animal scientists have studied, there’s […]

Article by George Haughn The primary plant cell wall of land plants is an essential cellular structure needed for support, cell-cell adhesion, signaling and interaction with both the biotic and abiotic environment. It is composed of a complex, dynamic extracellular matrix consisting of a network of carbohydrate polymers (cellulose, hemicellulose and, pectin) and structural proteins. Wall composition can vary dramatically both throughout the life of individual cells and between different cell types. Such variation is necessary given the need for growth and differences in the function of various cell types. Due to its structural complexity, cell-cell variation and the paucity of analytical […]

Article by Katy Hind, Sandra Lindstrom, and Patrick Martone It is estimated that we have described only 10-20% of species diversity on Earth.  In particular, floristic surveys using modern molecular techniques have revealed that we are vastly underestimating the number of seaweed species.  This finding has implications for researchers using classical methods of identification and is likely complicating studies of ecology and physiology.  At the Hakai Institute, on Calvert Island along the central coast of British Columbia, Drs. Katy Hind, Sandra Lindstrom, and Patrick Martone are using an integrative approach that combines genetics, ecology, biogeography and historical DNA to accurately assess species diversity. […]

​Article by Carl Douglas Do plants have different sexes, meaning distinct male and female individual organisms within a species? The separation of male and female sexual function into different individuals is called “dioecy” and is common in eukaryotes, occurring in 94% of animals. Yes – this occurs in plants but in contrast to animals it is uncommon, occurring in only 6% of flowering plant species.  A recent publication from the research groups of Quentin Cronk, Carl Douglas, and collaborators in the journal Molecular Ecology sheds new light on the evolution of dioecy, with practical spin-offs. The evolution of dioecy is often accompanied by sex […]

Figure 1. Five years old Populus trichocarpa trees at Totem Field collection, UBC. Article by Adriana Suarez-Gonzalez (Douglas lab) If you are reading this article, then you survived your birth, acclimated to rainy and cold weather and have successfully battled a number of flu viruses. The same happens in trees, but because plants are stationary and can’t move, these issues are even more extreme. When a seed lands on the soil it has two options:  survive or die – it can’t move to a more favorable environment.  Just as hybrid cars use two or more distinct power sources to move the vehicle (usually […]

Article by Xin Li lab Like animals, plants are constantly exposed to bacteria, viruses, and fungi that have the potential to cause diseases. To remain healthy plants possess a complex immune system which relies on immune receptors that are able to recognize pathogens and respond before an infection is established. If a pathogen is able to avoid detection by the immune system, the resulting plant disease can result in dramatic economic losses. An estimated 15% of potential crop output is lost to plant diseases, and periodic disease outbreaks can lead to large-scale social turmoil, such as the Irish potato famine1. Despite the importance […]

Article by Sandra Lindstrom, Paul  Gabrielson, Jeff Hughey, Erasmo Macaya and  Wendy  Nelson. This project is not something I ever envisioned.  How did someone who is interested in the biogeography and phylogeny of seaweeds occurring on the West Coast of North America end up leading a project that revised the taxonomy of a genus of seaweeds known only from the Southern Hemisphere?  It was in fact because of my interest in a genus of predominantly Northern Hemisphere species (Mastocarpus, the Turkish washcloth) that I asked Paul Gabrielson to collect specimens of that genus for me in Chile.  What he collected turned […]

Article by the Samuels lab Trees and other plants need strength to stand upright and move water effectively from their roots to their leaves. That strength comes from the cell walls that plant cells build around themselves as they grow. Cell wall material makes up most of the mass of plants. Trees that live for many years form more and more cell wall material every year, while retaining the material from previous years, resulting in considerable accumulations of mass, carbon, and useable materials in the form of timber. Along with cellulose, lignin is an important component of those walls. Lignin is […]

​ Article by Xin Li lab Like animals, plants are constantly exposed to bacteria, viruses, and fungi that have the potential to cause diseases. To remain healthy plants possess a complex immune system which relies on immune receptors that are able to recognize pathogens and respond before an infection is established. If a pathogen is able to avoid detection by the immune system, the resulting plant disease can result in dramatic economic losses. An estimated 15% of potential crop output is lost to plant diseases, and periodic disease outbreaks can lead to large-scale social turmoil, such as the Irish potato famine1. Despite the […]

A new grassroots effort—announced this month in Trends in Ecology and Evolution—is calling for a reevaluation of some terminology used in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) to make it more inclusive and precise. The initiative, the EEB Language Project was launched by like-minded scientists across the United States and Canada, including three University of British Columbia researchers—Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor, Dr. Alex Moore and Dr. Danielle Ignace. “The project started as a Twitter conversation among a few people discussing potentially harmful terminology,” says Dr. Gaynor, an author on the paper who studies the impact of human activity on biodiversity. “It was important for us to […]