Phycology in the 21st Century

In many places that offer courses on Freshwater Algae, some are offered at field stations where natural history, ecology and taxonomy are highlighted.  In on-campus courses, the focus may be on systematics and evolution, based more and more on evidence derived from molecular data.  In the workshop “Freshwater Phycology in the 21st Century” we aimed to offer a learning environment in the context of a field station that combined the excitement of field expeditions and discovery, viewing and identifying algae with a light microscope in the lab.  We also accessed remote resources like a scanning electron microscope to document unknown species and determine its phylogenetic position.  Students learned to culture material from their collections extract dna from cultured material.  A variety of molecular techniques for phylogenetic analysis were presented, and examples from the Rhopalodiales used to demonstrate numerous approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction with morphological and molecular data.  Projects using molecular data from the cyanobacterial symbionts and the diatom hosts, as well as morphology, were developed for this group of interesting diatoms and their symbionts.  Workshop participants presented their results investigating Vitamin B12 pathways, synteny of the blue algal genomes and the levels of congruence and incongruence between phylogenies based on a variety of data sources.