The lab recently commissioned composer Marcus Norris of the South Side Symphony to write a concerto on the theme of human resilience, drawing inspiration from the lab’s work on resilience in leaf venation networks. Check out this recent performance of the piece at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa, California, with Megan Shung on erhu.…

Lab postdoc Ilaine shares her new paper in New Phytologist! If you ever spend time looking at leaves of different species, you probably noticed that the way leaf veins are organized varies enormously (Fig.1). Some leaves only have a single vein, others exhibit complex venation networks with thousands of interconnected veins. Some networks are strictly…

I just had a new paper come out (read in in the American Journal of Botany or download a PDF) exploring the question of why triploid aspen are common in western North America. This pattern is initially difficult to explain because triploids typically have low fertility due to chromosome segregation problems. The study does a…

Like a straw can collapse under the suction of a thirsty drinker, the xylem conduits in leaves can collapse as water potential declines during droughts (Figure 1). In collapsed conduits the water flow is limited or even completely interrupted, so plants must reinforce their conduits to resist crushing pressures. The thicker the conduit double cell…