Office of Undergraduate Research

Building the Tree of Life: Tracing the Evolution of Plants

Students will be involved in a project that helps botanists understand evolutionary relationships in plants. By involvement in a small "miniproject" that will be their specialty, they will learn basic lab techniques used in many biology labs (DNA extraction, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), DNA purification, processing sequence data). They will also receive training in how to derive evolutionary trees and correlate such trees with morphological and biogeographical data

Tasks and responsibilities:

Will perform tasks as described above under supervision. Will contribute to lab maintenance and some minor clerical tasks. Student will keep careful records of all work. While student will help with several projects, the student will select one project from several I will present that they can work on more extensively. This way the student can experience the personal satisfaction of seeing a project through from beginning to end as much as possible.