Dear Fellow-bryologists -- "Exciting news" could only be about Sphagnum, I'm sure you will agree!
I wanted to take this opportunity to announce to the broader bryological community that my proposal with Dave Weston (Oak Ridge National Lab) to the U.S. DOE-Joint Genome Institute (JGI) to sequence a Sphagnum genome has been approved, and the sequencing work will begin shortly.
Our proposal focused on Sphagnum as a land plant clade with arguably the most significant impacts on carbon sequestration (and climate change) of any plant group. The fact that Sphagnum represents an early diverging clade of bryophytes, quite distant (phylogenetically) from other bryophyte genomes (especially JGI's "Flagship" species, Physcomitrella patens), provides added value for studying genome evolution across land plants. And of course we anticipate that a genome will very much facilitate on-going work on peatmoss evolutionary and reproductive biology.
We look forward to working with other members of the bryological community to maximize the value of this work!
Jon Shaw
Duke
That's fantastic!
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