I am a senior double majoring in EBIO (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) and MCDB (Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology) graduating this spring. Since taking advanced placement biology my senior year of high school I have been enamored with the study of life on our planet. Particularly with understanding how the organisms we take for granted came into existence as they are today. However, it was not until my Sophomore year that I fell in love with plant evolution and began studying the trait evolution of the tomato family (Solanaceae) in the Smith lab. I spent my first year and a half studying the Solanaceae鈥檚 fossil record and comparing the traits we see in fossils from the family with traits we see in its living species today. Since then I have been working on my own individual project, studying the evolutionary history of seed wings in the family.
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While many people are familiar with winged fruits, like the little helicopter fruits dropped by many maples and lindens, people tend to be less familiar with winged seeds, and the distinction is evolutionarily important. However, if you have ever pulled the long, thin, flaky part out of the inside of a pinecone (or is that just me), you have seen a winged seed. Seed wings are a lot more common in coniferous plants, but they are present in a handful of species of flowering plants. This discrepancy effectively gets at the crux of my thesis: to what degree do plant鈥檚 dispersal mechanisms affect the presence of wings on their seeds? Because coniferous plants do not produce fruits, which attract animals to do the job of dispersing the plant鈥檚 seeds, they must rely entirely on the environment to disperse their seeds. Thus, it makes sense that their seeds would often develop wings. However, we still find flowering plants that also produce winged seeds, some of which are in the Solanaceae. So I set out to collect data on the dispersal methods and presence or absence of winged seeds in roughly 1500 Solanaceae species, about half of the species in the family. The hope is to find any potential correlation between different dispersal methods and the presence of winged seeds and also to put together a more or less comprehensive estimate for the evolutionary history of the seed wing trait in the Solanaceae family.
