What does Shaun do all day?

This blogging stuff isn't so hard. Some of you may be asking what I do all day. I recently finished working at Linden Nursery, and now I am currently doing research for my master's program in Genetics and Biotechnology. I'm researching a flower that is native to Utah called Penstemon.With drought changing the way we consume water, more and more people are turning to plants that are drought tolerant.

Penstemon are great plant for the job. In June I visited Ely Nevada for the APS meetings and found that these plants were growing happily in the desert and blooming like crazy. I am working with some treatments to hopefully improve these plants so that they can bloom longer, have bigger, more brilliant flowers, and have stronger fragrance.

To do this my coworkers and I are using a couple of different methods. For the first treatment, we put a chemical on the plants that disrupts cell division. The chromosomes can't divide evenly so cells will end up with twice as many chromosomes. In other words, we are doubling the DNA. This has created some unusal looking plants.

Here is a normal Penstemon:
Here are Penstemon plants with double the DNA: The leaves are a lot larger and shaped differently. We are using a machine called a flow cytometer. In the simplist terms, this machine measures how big cell nuclei are. If the nucleus from a plant is twice as big, then it has twice as much DNA. We also use a special microscope to look at the chromosomes within the cell's nucleus. We can actually count them. Here is picture we took of the chromosomes:The light blue dots are chromosomes. There are thirty two dots instead of the normal sixteen that would be in a normal Penstemon.

That last thing we're working on is just causing little (or point) mutations throughout the DNA using a chemical. It's a shot gun approach and you can't be sure of what you will get. Here is a picture of a treated plant that has two leaves that are fused together. (They form a "V" shape). Now we're working on trying to get them to bloom so we can see what the flowers are like. If something is unique enough, then the plant could be sold to a company that will patent it and sell it nationally.