Myriopteris lindheimeri (Hook.) J. Sm.
Vascular plants have been on earth for nearly 400 million years. We shed light on the mysteries of their evolution through exploration and experimentation—and we fight to preserve their diversity, harnessing the power of museum collections and field expeditions for conservation and discovery.
What’s new in the Grusz Lab?
Dr. Grusz is awarded a US National Science Foundation EAGER grant to study the evolution of obligate apomixis in ferns.
Dr. Grusz has been awarded a Grant in Aid from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota to study the biological and evolutionary implications of severe drought in deserts of North America.
New data from Picard et al. (2021) reveal frequent origins of obligate apomixis in Pteris L. globally. Click here to read more about how Kathryn and colleagues used museum specimens to explore worldwide patterns of geographical parthenogenesis in ferns.
Check out the great work conducted by the Grusz Lab’s very own, undergraduate researcher Sarah Myint. Sarah’s UROP study leveraged comparative bioinformatics to test the power of genome skimming data for answering evolutionary questions in hybrid organisms. Click the link below to learn more about her work!
Click the link below to learn more about our newest publication in the American Journal of Botany special issue Life without water:
Grusz, A.L., M.D. Windham, K.T. Picard, E. Schuettpelz, K.M. Pryer, and C.H. Haufler. 2021. A drought-driven hypothesis for the origin of obligate apomixis in ferns: evidence from pellaeids (Pteridaceae). American Journal of Botany 108:263–283.
The Grusz Lab approached the onset of Covid-19 with a ‘can do’ attitude, embracing Zoom and shifting our focus toward supercomputing and conducting analyses using python, R, and other key bioinformatics programs and packages.
Senior UMD undergraduates Jacob Martin and Abigail Roufs presented the results of their summer research at the Fall 2019 Undergraduate Research Showcase. Martin conducted paid summer research in the Grusz lab with support from a BURST Fellowship (2019) and Roufs served as an undergraduate researcher at the Glensheen Historic Mansion.
Undergraduate researchers were on a roll at Botany 2019. The Grusz lab is proud to announce that Blake Fauskee (University of Minnesota Duluth, ‘19) received a Young Botanist Award from the Botanical Society of America, and undergraduate Hannah Ranft (Johns Hopkins University, ‘20; NMNH NHRE) earned the impressive Edgar T. Wherry Award for best paper in the Pteridological section at the annual Botany meetings.
Grusz lab members Blake Fauskee and Noah Olson (UMN Duluth, class of '2019) will spend their summer exploring museum collections in the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, contributing to a project exploring the evolutionary implications of asexual reproduction on organismal diversity.
Grusz Lab undergraduate Blake Fauskee awarded prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
