First year graduate student Rebekah Mohn received the ASPT award for her t-shirt design using the Minnesota native plant Linnaea borealis. ​She also received the TRIARCH Botanical Image travel grant to Botany 2018 for her photo, Dewy Tentacles. Thanks Alex Eilts from the CBS Conservatory for letting Rebekah sample and photograph his plants!

This summer Rebekah​ took the six-week long Tropical Plant Systematics Course offered by Organization of Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. With the course she visited four different research stations and enjoyed everything from high altitude paramo and cloud forest to lowland tropical dry forest and rain forest. While there, she found and studied blue-green fluorescence under UV light of spike mosses (Selaginella) and club mosses in response to desiccation stress. 

In addition, Rebekah has been utilizing her Zoological Soceity Fund Natural History Award from the Bell and her J.S. Karling Graduate Student Research Award from the Botanical Society of America to collect sundews (Drosera) from New Jersey, Virginia, Idaho, Montana, and soon northern Minnesota. 

​Way to go, Rebekah!

We had our first lab trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden for the 2018 Fall Symposium. Diego and Ya spent a day before the symposium to collect samples in the garden's living collection, Rebekah got her "Drosera starter kit", and everyone enjoyed the talks, tour of the herbarium and the garden, and interacting with people there. We visited the City Museum afterwards, which was tone of fun (although Zacky might think otherwise). Many thanks to Rebekah for driving, introducing us to people and places, and showing us the best of St. Louis!

After half a year of comprehensive renovation, two weekend flooding emergency events in the middle of winter, two months of purchasing and testing, followed by tearing up and rebuilding the hood, and getting -80 freezer and alarm/backup system in place, the Yang Lab has been finally up and running since June 2017. Many thanks to the College of Biological Sciences facilities manager Christina Kramer and our wonderful lab manager Yinyin Huang!

Office summer 2016 before renovation

Offices summer 2017 after renovation

​Lab summer 2016 before renovation

Lab summer 2017 after rennovation

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/07/079582
As the data collection for the Caryophyllales phylotranscriptome project is winding down, and I am setting up my new lab at University of Minnesota, we spent some time summarizing all the field and lab protocols, with additional (super cool) field collection notes from Hannah Marx.

​Take home message: for most of us the logistics of obtaining frozen samples from the field is not that bad, and it gives you all the possibilities of analyzing DNA, RNA, and secondary metabolites. 

Super excited to introduce the Yang Lab, starting November 1, 2016! We are located on the seventh floor of the Biological Sciences Building at the St. Paul campus of University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.