Blog post #2 by Asstan Cisse
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been learning R for data analysis purposes and reading articles about Pedicularis (family Orobanchaceae) and heterospecific pollination to become well-informed about my summer project. Recently, I started fieldwork alongside Ph.D. candidate Rachel Cohen, in the Eaton Lab, at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, Colorado, just outside of Crested Butte, CO. The experience has been surreal, as the views here are simply breathtaking. Of course, with beautiful views comes hard work. We have been working on over 1000 semi-in vivo crosses with the stigma/styles of over six different species of flowers, ranging from Pedicularis racemosa to Pedicularis groenlandica. In these semi-in vivo crosses, we cross-pollinate various styles with pollen of our choice to observe if these styles will show pollen tube growth, helping us investigate the pollen tube growth phase of the plant reproductive cycle. I have learned so much during the time I have spent doing fieldwork, from plant identification to plant phylogeny, thanks to the knowledge I have gained from both my mentor and various articles on Pedicularis and other species we work with.
Fieldwork is definitely rewarding, as I am able to hike mountains with elevations over 10,000 ft. to collect flower buds for our semi-in vivo crosses. Moreover, I have bravely fought off many pollinators by implementing pollinator exclusion on many of our species in the field as we slowly prepare to conduct field-crosses towards the end of July. I am excited to analyze our data and see where our results lie in regards to our research interest in Pedicularis. The summer has been amazing so far, and I am thrilled for more breakthroughs.
