Friday, February 10 4:44 pm
Curator John Sparks will be blogging about the upcoming exhibition Creatures of Light. Photo courtesy of John Sparks
Curator John Sparks will be blogging weekly about the upcoming exhibition, Creatures of Light, which opens on Saturday, March 31.
In just a little over a month, on March 31, the American Museum of Natural History will open our latest exhibition, Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, which focuses on the amazing diversity of organisms that produce light across every conceivable habitat. Every exhibition we produce is a collaboration between the Museum’s research scientists and the exhibition team, which includes writers, designers, artists, and media specialists. I’m the curator for this exhibition, which means that I oversee the scientific content and bring expertise from my research—in this case, on the evolution of bioluminescent signaling systems in marine fishes. We’re hard at work on the show this month, and I’ll be writing weekly posts from behind the scenes to offer some glimpses of what goes into producing a major exhibition. Here’s my first dispatch:
Getting the Light Right
Scientific accuracy is our top priority. Although it may seem trivial, getting the color (or wavelength) of the emitted light just right for this exhibition’s many models of bioluminescent creatures—fireflies, glowworms, siphonophores, and ponyfishes—is fundamental to accurately reproducing the diversity of natural light that organisms use for a variety of functions. Read more »
Friday, December 16 1:44 pm
This rendering illustrates the phylogenomic reconstruction of the evolutionary diversification of seed plants (E.K. Lee et al.). Click to enlarge.
Working with colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the New York Botanical Garden, and New York University, Museum scientists have created the largest genome-based tree of life for seed plants. Their findings plot the evolutionary relationships of 150 different species of plants based on advanced genome-wide analysis of gene structure and function. This new approach, called “functional phylogenomics,” allows scientists to reconstruct the pattern of events that led to the vast number of plant species we see today and could help identify genes used to improve seed quality for agriculture.
The research, performed by members of the New York Plant Genomics Consortium, was funded by the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Program to identify the genes that caused the evolution of seeds, a trait of important economic interest.
The species the group studied span from the flowering variety—peanuts and dandelions, for example—to non-flowering cone plants like spruce and pine. The sequences of the plants’ genomes—all of the biological information needed to build and maintain an organism, encoded in DNA—were either culled from pre-existing databases or generated, in the field and at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, from live specimens. Read more »
Thursday, December 08 11:34 am
Big cats are shy, nocturnal, and difficult to observe. © iStockphoto/Ammit
For the past five years, Museum scientists, in collaboration with the Panthera Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting big cats in the wild, have been tracking tigers, lions, jaguars, and snow leopards through DNA in scat, or fecal specimens, gathered in the field. Now, through a generous grant from the Leslie and Daniel Ziff Foundation, the Global Felid Conservation Genetics Program can accelerate the pace of this important work by expanding the program’s laboratory component.
“We’re very excited about it,” says George Amato, director of the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics and the Center for Conservation Genetics, which is responsible for sequencing the big cats’ DNA and analyzing the results. “In terms of scale, it is now the largest project of its kind in the world.”
Collecting more than 3,000 fecal samples so far and sharing the resulting data free of charge to researchers around the world, the Global Felid Conservation Genetics Program follows animals subject to a variety of threats, from diminished habitat to hunting by traders in body parts. For example, compared to more than 100,000 over a century ago, there are fewer than 3,200 tigers in Asia today, occupying only seven percent of their historic range. The research has yielded some good news—a newly identified population of tigers in Laos; more genetic diversity than expected in some areas—but researchers also found that, in a supposedly protected area in Cambodia, one population of tigers had died out. Read more »
Wednesday, November 30 10:02 am
A Gotham bee nests underground. Credit: Louise Lynch/University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Click to enlarge.
Researchers have uncovered four new species of bees in New York City, one of which has an especially fitting name: Lasioglossum gotham. The newly described city dwellers are among 11 East Coast bees recently identified by Cornell University postdoctoral researcher Jason Gibbs in the journal Zootaxa with the help of vast digital and physical bee collections at the American Museum of Natural History.
All of the newly discovered species are sweat bees—small-to-medium-sized bees named for their attraction to the salt in human sweat.
“Declines in honey bees and other bees have received a lot of attention in recent years, but it is not generally appreciated that bee species entirely new to science are still being discovered even within our largest cities. New York City has a surprising diversity of bees, with more than 250 described species recorded,” said John Ascher, a research scientist in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology who collected and curated specimens of some of the new species. Read more »
Thursday, October 27 1:22 pm
John Sparks and David Gruber study bioluminescent organisms, many of which live deep in the ocean. Click to enlarge. © Neil van Niekerk
Museum scientists John Sparks and David Gruber have traveled the world in search of bioluminescent and biofluorescent organisms. On Wednesday, November 2, at 7 pm, the pair will host November’s SciCafe, Alive and Glowing: Adventures in Bioluminescence and Biofluorescence, and shed light on the way these phenomena have appeared throughout the tree of life. Dr. Sparks will also curate the Museum’s upcoming special exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, which opens March 31. Below, Sparks and Gruber answer a few questions about their enlightening research.
What’s the difference between bioluminescence and biofluorescence?
John Sparks: For an organism to biofluoresce, it must be illuminated by—in other words, absorb photons from—an external source of light. Turn off the light source, and there’s no fluorescence. In bioluminescence, the light-producing reaction takes place inside of an organism, requiring no external source of light. Some organisms combine both bioluminescence and biofluorescence, such as the jellyfish Aequorea. Read more »
