By Marybel Soto Gomez

Marybel is a graduate student in the Botany Department at the University of British Columbia. When she is not daydreaming about plant sex, you will probably find her trying to sequence their plastid genomes (for her Masters project), collecting them (for fun), tending to them (in her garden) or eating them (she's a vegetarian).

METAGENOMIC METHODS REVEAL MARVELOUS MICROBIAL MICROCOSMS

Do you know how many different kinds of microbes exist on Earth? It may sound like a silly question but please indulge me and try to come up with a number… ready for the answer…? I hate to disappoint you but… it turns out that we still do not know! For most of the twenty-first century, few biologists contested the view that plants and animals accounted for the majority of the planet’s diversity (Curtis et al. 2006). Their perspective on microbial diversity was deeply skewed by the fact that they only recognized the select few species capable of growing under…

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ORCHID LOVE

Do you ever think about plant sex? I still remember walking into the first class of my first ever plant biology course during my undergraduate degree and my professor introducing himself as just another botanist who is obsessed with plant sex. At the time I thought my professor was a quirky guy trying to get the students’ attention by talking about sex, but now that I am doing a Masters in Botany, it all makes sense – I have yet to meet a botanist who is not absolutely fascinated by the whys and hows and whos and wheres of plant…