Vad har grönalger, strutsar och bin gemensamt? Forskarna Charlie Cornwallis och Maj Rundlöf presenterade deras forskning på ett välbesökt Tandem talk den 2 februari.
Djurs och organismers sociala förmåga – samarbete i alla nivåer av liv är alltså något som intresserar båda forskarna.
Charlie Cornwallis pratade under rubriken ”Evolutionen av ett socialt liv”.
Varför skapas samarbetande grupper och hur skiljer de sig åt? På senare tid har Charlie uppmärksammats för forskningen på strutsar och deras förmåga att samarbeta kring parning och ruvning. Charlie är även intresserad av grupper av flercelliga organismer formas – och då särskilt grönalger. Till sin hjälp har Charlie det han kallar A-laget – eller alg-laget – och de behövs! I synnerhet när det finns långt över 4000 arter att studera: tillsammans har de utvecklat system för att studera flercellighet.
Maj Rundlöf höll ett föredrag med titeln ”Bin, socialitet och landskapets ekotoxikologi”.
Maj Rundlöf har studerat bin och hur de exponeras för bekämpningsmedel och hur de påverkas av det. När bin är ute och samlar pollen och nektar plockar de även upp bekämpningsmedel. Detta leder till att bin skapar unika blandningar genom att ta med sig pollen, nektar och gifter hem. Vi kan fråga oss om bin gör någon form av riskbedömning överhuvudtaget? Hur stora områden rör sig i beror på hur sociala de är. Ju mer sociala bin är desto mer utsatta, men också bättre på att hantera utsattheten blir de.
Idag blev avtackning av Dan Nilsson av trots allt. Första försöket att tacka av Dan arrangörerna ställa in med kort varsel då Dan blev sjuk. Det var nära att det inte blev någon avtackning idag heller då det plötsligt uppstod problem med matleveransen.
Dan Nilsson fick både blommor och presenter.
De skickliga organisatörerna lyckades dock lösa matproblemet i sista stund och avtackningen gick att genomföra som planerat.
Dan Nilsson har arbetat på Lunds universitet sedan 1984, men varit intresserad av synforskning ännu längre. Bland gamla dokument på datorn hittade Dan en uppsats om syn som han skrev redan 1973.
Olle Anderbrant överlämnar en present från Funktionell zoologi.
Många var det som ville hålla tal och tacka Dan för gott samarbete. Först ut var Funktionell zoologis enhetschef Olle Anderbrant som hade grävt i Primula för att se vilket avtryck Dan lämnat där.
Eric Warrant gav Syngruppens presenter till Dan.
Därefter var det dags för mannen som kommer att ta över ledarskapet av Syngruppen – Eric Warrant. Det var Dan som hämtade hit Eric från Australien i början på 90-talet. Inte kunde Eric tro att han skulle bli kvar i Lund i mer än två år.
Av Fredrik Johansson fick Dan en tröja så han inte glömmer grundutbildning.
Som representant för grundutbildningen tackade Fredrik Johansson Dan för hans fina insatser som lärare. Dan är en av de bästa lärarna jag haft. Jag kommer ihåg hur fascinerad jag var av Dans föreläsning om hur fiskar simmar och fåglar flyger.
Christer Löfstedt visade hur han kastade en krita på en student.
Förrförre prefekten Christer Löfsted berättade hur Dan och Christer jobbat tillsammans mot samma mål – att få ihop en ny fungerande biologisk institution.
Anders Tunlid talade om. hur han ofta gick till Dan när han var upprörd.
Anders Tunlid var tillsammans med Dan med i BISAM-gruppen som planerade ihopgåendet av den nya institutionen 2009. Under ett år hade Anders och Dan varit på 25 möte tillsammans, många av dem heldagsmöte. Ett gediget arbete.
En och annan present blev det.
Det var många nuvarande och före detta kollegor som kom och tackade av Dan, vissa kom till och med från andra länder. Som tur är kommer Dan att fortsätta som emeritus så det finns en stor chans att du stöter på honom i korridoren även i fortsättningen.
Många av presenterna hade anknytning till Dans forskning. Bland annat ett pussel med manetmotiv.
Tack Dan för din handledning, dina bus med dörrskyltarna på gamla Zootis och ett och annat matkrig!
Den 2 december hade grundutbildningsnämnden möte. Då diskuterades bland annat tilldelning till kurser, alumnundersökning, visumproblem, lärardagen, budget, överbelastade assistenter, direktupphandling av juridisk person, kurslitteratur och kursanalyser.
Den 14 december hade institutionsstyrelsen möte. Då diskuterades bland annat budgeten för 2023, personalärenden, översynen av enheterna och eventuella strömbortfall.
The Biology Doctoral Student Council (BDR) had meetings on 5 December. Among other things, they discussed the meeting with the head and deputy head of the department, the invited speaker and an intro event for new PhD students.
Marie Brandrud talked about cytotypes in Cochlearia.
During 29 November we celebrated that it was exactly 100 years since the young botanist Göte Turesson coined a concept that he called the “ecotype”. At that time, it had passed 60 years since Charles Darwin buried the idea that species are unchanging and of divine origin and 20 years since the works of Gregor Mendel on inheritance were rediscovered around 1900. However, the knowledge about genetic variability in natural populations was still poor, with both conceptual and methodological limitations.
On behalf of the organizers, Torbjörn Säll, opened the meeting, pointing out some of the basic concepts that were introduced by Turesson. He also stressed that formation of ecotypes depends on the balance between gene flow and selection.
Anna Tunlid, Lund University, approached the life and mission of Göte Turesson from a history of science perspective. We learnt that he was a rather stubborn person already in his youth. He dismissed the Swedish higher system of education and found a way to get his education in biology at the State University of Washington, Seattle, where a relative could provide housing. After returning to Sweden in 1915 he took up advanced studies in Botany at Lund University, culminating in a doctoral thesis, presented in 1922.
He observed that many species showed different morphological and physiological traits dependent on where they grew, whether it was alvar areas, sand dunes or coastal cliffs. He found differences in stature, number of flowers, leaf shape and other important traits. He could show that this variation was not merely environmental modifications, as earlier expected, but rather explained by a strong genetic component. He did this by a series of experiments in which he transplanted plants to his own garden in Malmö and later to an experimental garden that was established in Åkarp, between Lund and Malmö, at an institute for genetics affiliated to Lund University, founded by Herman Nilsson-Ehle. He defended his Ph D theses in 1922 and published several important manuscripts the same year. He was very productive during the following years, but permanent positions were rare at the time, especially those that were connected with appropriate economic resources. Turesson applied for several professorships that became open, both in Lund and Uppsala. Unfortunately, this engaged him in conflicts when his candidatures for these positions were dismissed, partially because his research spanned across the established subjects. When he eventually got a for him less desired professorship at the Agricultural College at Ultuna by 1935, he entered a somewhat less productive phase, followed by gradually increasing health problems.
Rut Cozien presented some case studies concerning pollination ecotypes, one of these about lizard pollination.
Timo van der Niet and Ruth Cozien, invited guests from Kwa-Zulu Natal University, South Africa, exemplified how the ecotype concept can be expanded to pollination biology, with plant species repeatedly coevolving with alternative pollinators. They use cameras triggered by movement to reveal the pollination agents and we were shown an example in which a plant that was thought to be pollinated by small mammals, instead was pollinated by small lizzards.
Kerstin Johannesson from Gothenburg University gave an exposé of her studies of marine snails belonging to the genus Littorina, which display ecotypes adapted to exposed and protected sea-shore habitats. Over the years she has conducted parallel morphological, behavioural and genetic studies. Her genetic work was initiated by isozyme studies, more recently culminating in whole-genome-analyses. One of the new findings is that much of the divergence of ecotypes is hosted by several inversions, which explains why few individuals display intermediate traits despite full interfertility.
Hans Jacquemyn told us about ecotypes induced by adaptation to differen types of fungal mycorrhiza in the orchid Epipactis helleborine.
Hans Jacquemyn from KU Leuwen, Belgium, gave examples of the role of mychorrhizal fungi in driving ecotype formation of in partially mycoheterotrophic plants, that is, plants that are engaged in mutualistic associations with fungi. The ecotypes are formed when the plants grow in habitats with contrasting fungal communities, in this case forest soils and coastal sand dunes. This kind of ecotypes occur both in orchids (Epipactis helleborine) and in plants with ericaceous mychorrhiza (Pyrola rotundifolia). The ecotypes are somewhat morphologically differentiated but the differentiation is most evident at genomic level.
Marie Brandrud from Oslo University gave a talk about parallel ecotypic divergence in an autotetraploid plant (Cochlearia officinalis) with three distinct ecotypes in spring, estuary and beach habitats in Northern Norway. The genomic data is not conclusive if the ecotypes have been formed repeatedly or are results of a single event.
Sophie Karrenberg from Uppsala University had explored an old archive with reprints from Turesson´s writings and stressed that he not only invented the ecotype concept, but also contributed early ideas and concepts concerning speciation processes. She exemplified this with her own research on Silene dioica (red flowers) and S. latifolia (white white flowers) which are interfertile but kept apart by ecological differentiation which is maintained by many loci with small habitat-dependent effects.
Both Honor Prentice and Björn Widén from Lund University have studied plants from Alvar habitats on Öland. Honor discussed how strong gradients in water availability is the basis for adaptation to microhabitats in the grass Festuca ovina despite strong gene flow. Björn discussed the origin and long-term demography of two ecotypes belonging to an endemic species, Helianthemum oelandicum ssp. oelandicum. He was about to end his demographic studies after several decades, when the population experienced severe mortality during the drought summer 2018, followed by strong recruitment the next year. This turned everything upside down and urged him to continue, giving new insights into the ecological and genetical dynamics of the ecotypes.
Gróa Valgerthur Ingimundardottir, Ph d student from Lund University works with one of the classic Turesson ecotype species, Scorzoneroides (Leontodon) autumnalis. Her results show that colour and hairiness of the involucral bracts, as well as size and number of flower heads, which have been used to delimit varieties of S. autumnalis, are environmentally plastic and strongly affected by temperature. It is possible that Turesson was aware of this, since he appears to have focused on other characters in his studies of ecotypes in this species.
The formal part of the meeting ended with a panel discussion about the use of the ecotype concept today. Stefan Andersson, representing the organizers of the meeting, showed that the concept is widely used and also that it is increasingly applied in studies of other organism groups than plants. There is a tendency for misuse in situations where the word is used to represent accessions or local provenances in genomic studies, in particular of Arabidopsis thaliana. We also invited to a thematic issue of Nordic Journal of Botany that will be devoted to ecotypes in a wide sense. Anyone that is interested to submit manuscript to this issue can contact Stefan.
The meeting ended with a symposium dinner at Bryggan, IKDC-center, near to the Biology campus.
The organizers (Stefan Andersson, Nils Cronberg, Magne Friberg, Mikael Hedrén, Øystein Opedal from Lund University and Helena Persson from SLU Alnarp) want to thank all persons that contributed to make this meeting so successful. We also want to thank our sponsors Elly Olssons fond and the Mendelian Society in Lund.
Hi! My name is Janka and I’m a PhD student in Stanley Heinze’s lab. I’m fascinated by the neural basis of navigation, especially how insects can perform complex behaviours with very small brains. With bumblebees as my model organism, I am trying to find out how visual input is used for navigation using both electrophysiology and computational modelling.
I received my bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from the Technical University of Berlin, and discovered my fascination for the neural basis of animal behaviour during my thesis work at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, where I performed deep brain calcium imaging in freely behaving mice. I then decided to focus my studies on neuroscience and got a master’s degree in biomedical engineering with a focus on neurotechnology from Imperial College London. During my master I started working with insects, investigating the neural representation of aeroelasticity in dragonflies using extracellular electrophysiology.
Now, my PhD project under the supervision of Stanley Heinze focuses on the visual input pathways to the central complex, a brain region involved in many navigational tasks. Using intracellular electrophysiology and computational modelling, I want to find out which sensory cues bumblebees use and how they are integrated to make navigational decisions.
Den 23 november hade institutionsstyrelsen möte. Då diskuterades bland annat budgeten för 2023, anställningsärenden, strategiska planen, handledarkollegium och utredningen om sammanslagningen av geologiska institutionen, institutionen för naturgeografi och ekosystemvetenskap och Centrum för miljö- och klimatvetenskap.
Hi! I’m a Crafoord Foundation sponsored post-doctoral fellow at the Biology Department in Courtney Stairs’ lab.
I did my PhD in Paris at the National Museum of National History and was recently awarded the 2021 Best Parasitology Thesis Award in France from the French Society of Parasitology.
During my PhD in Paris at the National Museum of Natural History, I characterised the genome of gregarines, non-model apicomplexan parasite protists. My main objective was to assess the extent of diversity in these lineages through comparative genomic analysis.
I was also interested in the question of motility in apicomplexans as part of their interaction with the host cell. I have been invited to give an online seminar (in french) on December 13th to further describe my PhD work.
I am fascinated by eukaryotic microorganisms and aspire to explore their diversity and importance in the living world. Here in Lund within Courtney’s team, I still study protists, this time focusing on their relationships with prokaryotes in anoxic environments using culture-dependant and culture-independent metagenomics analysis.
Den 10 november hade forskarutbildningsnämnden möte. Då diskuterades bland annat BLAM, doktorandernas arbetsmiljösituation, kursen Doktorandstudier i biologi: vetenskap och dess filosofi och översynen av institutionens enhetsindelning.
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