Azolla, a little fern with massive green potential

Thank you Abe - for your very generous donation! It is very much appreciated! Kathleen

Thank you Bill for your donation and your very kind words! Much appreciated! Kathleen

Thank you Amanda - it was great to see you!!!

Hi Scott - It will probably take at least a year to get the data, assemble, it, annotate it, etc... Hopefully not much longer after that before we can put out our first publication! There is a huge gap in our knowledge of fern genomes - it is the only major lineage of land plants without a reference genome! Pretty shocking for 2014! Especially because ferns are the sister group to seed plants! But ferns do have BIG genomes, which is why they have been ignored in the past. Azolla is among the smallest of the fern genomes, plus with all its other bonus features, it just seems like the most obvious one to go after at this point - for so many reasons...

Merci Merci! Colette!!!

What an interesting connection that you have with Azolla! Azolla only has about 6-7 species worldwide, but by "landraces" I am assuming that you saw lots of variation out there. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines has about 500 accessions of Azolla that they have accumulated over the past 30 years or so, and some of these are better suited to pH, others to varying salt conditions, and others to ranges in temp, etc. About 150 of those 500 accessions are on their way now to Duke. We will be assessing them first for which satisfy our criteria best for creating a reference genome - this includes determining which are diploids (not good to sequence polyploids if you don't have to), and also to determine if there are any that represent more inbred lines (the more homozygous - the better - because it makes the genome assembly that much easier. Best, Kathleen

That's a good question, and you weren't the only one who was worried...! I think it was not a particular piece of media - I think it was ALL important. Having such a successful media blitz overall was very helpful. But ultimately what saved the day in this case was a Chinese company who took a chance with us. The Chinese in particular seem to be very open to funding the generation of tons of exciting new genomics data––is there a new model emerging here for how to do science––that government funding sources are overlooking as an opportunity? I think it's an interesting commentary on how various groups/people are now able to influence the choice of which genomes are worth sequencing. All is not lost, when the traditional sources of funding say no... Kathleen

Thanks Chandler!

Yes! Of course! As soon as we have the data, it will be available through NCBI SRA.

Dana: Thanks for your donation. Please give us the details of your novel when published. It may give us some more research ideas, or at worst, a good read!

Dana - Thank you very much for your support! Awesome to think we helped to support a science fiction novel - keep us posted!

Thanks!

Thanks!