Biology of Bryophytes and Lichens

Biology of Bryophytes and Lichens EEB 3240-001 & 001L (4 credits)

"SYLLABUS AND CONTENT FOR SPRING 2011 WILL BE UPDATED SOON"

Spring 2011 Lectures: T/TH 11.00 AM-12.15 PM Lab W 1-4PM

Lectures and laboratory in TLS181.

Contact Information

Bernard Goffinet
Associate Professor
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
office: 300 Pharmacy/Biology Building
voice: +1 860-486-5290
email: bernard.goffinet@uconn.edu
home page: http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/people/goffinet/

Teaching Assistant
Juan Carlos Villarreal
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
office: 316 Pharmacy/Biology Building
voice: +1 860-486-6306
email: juan.villarreal@uconn.edu
home page: http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/eebedia/index.php/Juan_Carlos_Villarreal

Announcements (NEW ONES POSTED)

Some comments or recommendations:
Assignment 1 is now posted. 1. Take the assignments seriously; this includes working on your presentation of the life cycle. The cleanliness of the assignment reflects on how serious you took the assignment. I value clean documents.Assignments are worth 5% of your final grade.
2. Answer the question: in many cases an answer was provided, yet, often it fails to actually answer the question. For example: Justify why the sporangium is diploid. Common answer: because it produces haploid spores. Well, a gametophyte produces haploid sperm-cells and eggs, does that make it diploid? No. A sporangium is diploid because it arises through mitotic division from a diploid zygote. That is all.

Here is a short document summarizing phylogenetic terms that you should know. Read this and let me know if you have any questions. This is not covered in class but considered to be covered by one of your earlier classes.


LABORATORY ATTENDANCE: you are required to attend the labs. If you miss 3 labs or more, without a written excuse you will automatically fail the class.

Textbook and readings

There is no official text book. Instead, you will be assigned readings from the primary literature to go with the lectures. The reading is required, and the material covered in the paper is part of the lecture material, and hence subject to questions on the midterm and final.
Two books that are relevant and available in the library: Introduction to Bryophytes by A. Vanderpoorten & B. Goffinet (2009) (here the link to the book, http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2326970/?site_locale=en_GB). This book is the most appropriate external reference for the class. Other books are Shaw & Goffinet (2000) Bryophyte Biology or its latest version Goffinet & Shaw (2008) and Nash (Lichen Biology, here the link to Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Lichen-Biology-Thomas-H-Nash/dp/0521459745). If you are interested, you can buy them. I can also order them at a discount (although it may come out close to what you get on line with major distributors).

Grade

The final grade is calculated based on your lecture grade (60%: midterm and - in part cumulative - final each worth 25%, and each of the two assignments worth 5%) and lab (40%: 30% final based on hands-on labs, and 5% of your paper presentation, 2.5% for summaries and 2.5% for participation in discussions).

Links

• Watch This: movie of bryophyte gametes
  

"Whitish smoke in the movie are small droplets containing smreps (deliberate misspelling of word for male gametes). The smreps in the droplets are still un-motile. When touch the water, they begin to swim. In our experiments, misting with water is trigger of the explosion. If antheridia were mature, the explosion begin within few minutes. The event continued about for 10 min. Intense light for video recording also seems to accelerate the phenomenon. Each antheridium is deeply sunk in a cavity of antheridiophore and there is a very small pore on the top of each cavity. Swollen cells of surrounding tissue might cause the pressure force. Cavers (1903) and Muggoch & Walton (1942) also discussed about the mechanism, but, I think no one examined about the detail mechanism of the phenomenon. In Hiroshima, the season of mreps dispersal is Spring (April to May). In our field observation, we detected many airborne smreps in the sunny day after rain shower. I do not have detail data about how many species of liverworts have airborne mreps. At least, Asian species of Conocephalum (C. japonicum) do in the same manner." M. Shimamura

Shimamura, M., Yamaguchi, T. & Deguchi, H. 2008. Airborne sperm of Conocephalum conicum (Conocephalaceae). J. Plant Res. 121: 69-71. http://www.springerlink.com/content/fl2105h6428366m3/

• Not surprisingly, internet sites devoted to the biology of bryophytes and lichens are "abundant", well let's say that sites dedicated to bryophytes exist! Some may hold information that is relevant to this class. One example is Bryophyte Ecology maintained by Dr. Janice Glime. I will look for more. You may want to consult the list maintained by Jessica Budke, another graduate student in my lab, and her moss blog entitled Moss Plants and more.
  

Schedule

Notes:
downloads require password; best viewed in Adobe Reader (some problems with the MAC "Preview" program).
The syllabus is subject to change. You will get papers assigned one lecture and maybe one week ahead. Check the site frequently.

Identifying bryophytes

Date	Topic	Reading	Lab.
Tu 18 Jan	Cancelled		First encounter with bryophytes, and visiting the herbarium.
Th 20 Jan	1. Bryophytes in the context of land plant evolution Land plant evolution figures Assignment 1 due Tuesday Jan. 25	article by Qiu et al.
Tu 25 Jan	2. Marchantiophyta or liverworts Liverwort figures	article by Shaw & Renzaglia but only the pages dealing with liverworts.	First encounter with bryophytes morphology
Th 27 Jan	3. Marchantiophyta or liverworts	Watch the video referred to under LINKS
Tu 1 Feb	4.Bryophyta or mosses Moss figures	Shaw & Renzaglia paper: pages on mosses;	liverworts
Th 3 Feb	5.Bryophyta or mosses		Discussion 1
Tu 8 Feb	6.Bryophyta or mosses	Notes on moss sporophyte	Mosses
Th 10 Feb	7.Anthocerophyta or hornworts	Shaw & Renzaglia paper: pages on hornworts; Hornwort figures
Tu 15 Feb	8. Symbiotic associations with bryophytes	article by Selosse et al.; Symbiosis hand-outs	Hornworts
Th 17 Feb	9. Land plant evolution		Discussion 2
Tu 22 Feb	10. Bryophytes as evo-devo model systems cont. Bryophyte Evo-devo hand outs	Menandetal.pdf Bryophyte genome hand-outs.pdf
Th 24 Feb	11. Peatland ecology	Peatland ecology
Tu 1 Mar	12. Peatlands and Global carbon	Global carbon economy Chapman et al.pdf	Identifying bryophytes
Th 3 Mar	13. Bryophyte ecophysiology	Ecophysiology.pdf Proctor
Tu 15 Mar	MIDTERM		Discussion 3
Th 17 Mar	10. Lichenized fungi Introduction hand outs
Tu 22 Mar			Introduction to lichens
Th 24 Mar
Tu 29 Mar			Lichen symbionts
Th 31 Mar			Discussion 4
Tu 5 Apr
Th 7 Apr
Tu 12 Apr
Th 14 Apr
Tu 19 Apr
Th 21 Apr
Tu 26 Apr
Th 28 Apr