OMG this looks amazing! Can't wait to read 🤩

Final question - what kind of soil did you use in the video above?

I never would have thought to use an electric toothbrush - that's so clever!

After flowering do they self on their own pretty well? Or did you have to help out with hand pollination?

Ok this whole thread makes me feel better. Maybe someday I can try again with C. nictitans. It would be so cool to go back and do some of the experiments we originally planned

Wow - what an amazing sample!

Although we find high rates of molecular evolution across mutualist genomes, symbiosis genes do not show evidence of ongoing coevolution. We would be happy to hear your feedback and ideas on our work!

We observed the same pattern in bacteria genomes. Genome wide, nodulating bacteria had higher dN/dS ratios compared to non-symbiotic bacteria.

Interestingly, we found higher dN/dS values in mutualist plants genome wide (shown in figure) but not at symbiotic genes.

We sequenced transcriptomes of 6 mutualistic legumes and 6 non-mutualistic close relatives (labelled tips in the tree) and compared dN/dS ratios across the genome and at symbiotic genes. We also compared dN/dS ratios in sequenced nodulating and non-symbiotic bacteria genomes

Surprisingly, we saw a decrease in diversity and increase in abundance of anaerobic taxa in treatments with high concentrations of organic de-icers. The drastic shift in the bacterial community suggests that organic de-icers may not be as “eco-friendly” as initially anticipated!

The impacts of traditional, inorganic, and organic de-icers were tested on lake water bacterial community assembly in a mesocosm experiment at QUBS. After 6 weeks, the 16S rRNA locus was sequenced in bacterial community samples.

Our team combines perspectives from molecular biologists, microbiologists, and ecologists including Troy Martin, Collin Juurakko, Shelley Arnott, and Virginia Walker