About us
Sunflowers, daisies, and their relatives belong to a family of plants that make up ca. 10% of flowering plant biodiversity and include numerous species of horticultural, medicinal, and industrial value. This group of flowering plants also contains economically important food crops including artichoke, lettuce, safflower, and sunflower. It is considered one of the most successful plant families due to its large size and global distribution. The family represents an excellent system for addressing a broad range of questions in ecology, comparative genomics, and plant conservation. Some of our latest work is to decipher the foundational genetic programs of inflorescence development, especially in the sunflower family. This work has the potential to improve food security through optimization of floral structures for yield in crops and for accelerating progress toward new crop development.
We are also especially motivated to create research opportunities and inclusive spaces that cultivate a diverse human community. Providing undergraduate and graduate training for diverse students is a key element of our research program. We also welcome visitors to the lab: for a few months or the whole summer, so if you are interested in applying new techniques to your study system, get in contact with us! See our research and publications for our latest work. We have been working a lot during COVID to find ways to connect the Compositae sunflower family community. A few of these efforts include a monthly seminar series + journal club, and a new peer-reviewed publication. Check them out!
News from the Lab
Spring 2024
New research from our lab in the journal Phytobiomes. We demonstrate the relative abundance of plant pathogens and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi increased with host genetic variation. This work provides evidence for drought and genotypic drivers of belowground sunflower–fungi interactions.
The lab attends the Plant Animal Genome #PAG31 in San Diego, CA. Erika, Paige, and Sam all present their research!
Summer 2023
Erika leads a coding workshop for UGs!
Special Issue at IJPS Guest Edited by Jennifer, Erika, and Mauricio Bonifacino is out. The cover is perfect Mauricio!
Spring 2023
Congrats to grad student Serena Blais (left) for being award an NSF-GRFP!!!
Sam Drewry joins lab as a new Masters student!
Fall 2022
Paris joins the lab as a new undergraduate researcher!
Serena joins lab as a new PhD student!
Spring 2022
Erika’s paper makes the cover of Castanea!
Erika wins several awards at the Annual Association of Southeastern Biologists Meeting! Plus we got to see Carol!
See also: 2022 Richard and Minnie Windler Award Recipients; Moore et al. 2022.
We update CBio on lab happenings!
Sam and Keiana join the lab as undergraduate researchers! Welcome!
Masi joins the lab as a research associate! Welcome!
Fall 2021
Jorge joins the lab as a Research Associate! Welcome!
Ram gets a great job and leaves us! 😭 Congrats to him!!
Summer 2021
Erika and Jennifer join the Editorial Board for the journal, CAPITULUM, check out our articles here: https://compositae.org/capitulum.php
We’re going to Botany and Evolution! See you there!
Spring 2021
Mike successfully defends his Master’s thesis!
The lab will present at this year’s virtual Association of Southeastern Biologists.
Jennifer gives a virtual talk at the California Botanic Garden.
We are learning Python!!! What did the Python say when he came out of his shell? Print(“Hello World!”)
Fall 2020
Erika is a PhD Candidate!! Congrats to her!!
Mike is a Masters Candidate!! Congrats to him!!
Jennifer is a new Associate Editor at Systematic Biology.
The final chapter in our carrot work with Patrick Abbot and the late Dave McCauley accepted at Journal of Heredity: “Mandel, J.R., A.J. Ramsey, J.M. Holley, V.A. Scott, D. Mody, P. Abbot. Disentangling complex inheritance patterns of plant organellar genomes: an example from carrot.”
Bort joins the Jetz lab at Yale as an Associate Research Scientist and working with the Map of Life to understand and quantify the diversity of Compositae (daisies, sunflowers, asters, thistles, etc) at a global scale, as well as to understand the role of extreme environments in driving plant diversification. Congrats!!!! Check out his website for all his latest updates here.
Summer 2020
Jennifer joins the Editorial Board at Journal of Systematics and Evolution.
Letter to the Editor with Deise Gonçalves, Bob Jansen, and Tracey Ruhlman out at Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.
Ram’s Antennaria paper is published in Systematic Botany.
Antennaria are dioecious perennial herbs distributed mainly in the Holarctic Region, with their major center of diversity in the Rocky Mountains of Western North America. The genus comprises 33 known sexual diploid/tetraploid species and at least five polyploid agamic complexes which mostly reproduce by forming asexual seeds. Our study provide a framework for future evolutionary studies of Antennaria, including speciation, origin(s) of polyploidy, and agamospermy in the genus.
Spring 2020
We are Zoomed out of our minds.
Carol Siniscalchi joins the Folk Lab at Mississippi State University. Check out her website here!
Fall 2019
Dr. Robert (Bort) Edwards joins the Mandel Lab!
Work from Nantucket on pollinator visitation in the presence of non-native species is out by Adam Ramsey and Mike Ballou. Check out their findings in Rhodora.
To address whether the presence of D. carota affects the pollination of native species on Nantucket, we sought to answer three questions: 1) Does the presence of D. carotaincrease pollinator visits and diversity on Sericocarpus asteroides? 2) Does the removal of D. carota restore pollinator visits and diversities to those found in plots with only S. asteroides? and 3) Is there a relationship between the amount of heterospecific pollen and distance to the nearest D. carota population?
Carol Siniscalchi’s paper in Frontiers in Plant Sciences is published.
In this study, we present the first attempt at studying the phylogeny of Vernonieae using phylogenomics. Even though our sampling includes only around 4% of the diversity of the tribe, we achieved complete resolution of the phylogeny with high support recovering approximately 700 nuclear markers obtained through target capture. We also analyzed the effect of missing data using two different matrices with different number of markers and the difference between concatenated and gene tree analysis.
Summer 2019
Botany in Tucson!
Spring 2019
Jennifer is named Assistant Director for The Center for Biodiversity Research!
Dr. Jennifer R Mandel