{"id":313,"date":"2017-03-06T18:09:51","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T17:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/?p=313"},"modified":"2018-02-16T11:22:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-16T10:22:07","slug":"plant-phylogenies-and-community-dynamics-at-the-ntnu-university-museum-with-ida-mienna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/2017\/03\/06\/plant-phylogenies-and-community-dynamics-at-the-ntnu-university-museum-with-ida-mienna\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Plant Phylogenies and Community Dynamics at the NTNU University Museum with Ida Mienna"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo
Master’s student Ida Mienna talks about her project and how she ended up at the NTNU University Museum. Photo: Ingegjerd Meyer Hellevig.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ida Mienna is a 23-year old Master\u2019s student at NTNU University, currently writing her thesis on plant phylogenies at the Department of Natural History at <\/em>NTNU University Museum<\/em><\/a>. I spoke with Ida about why she chose the museum for her thesis, her experiences thus far and what she has planned for the future.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a normal day in your life here at the Museum like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well right now, I\u2019m extracting DNA and performing PCR for around 200 plant species, so I\u2019m spending most of my time down here sequencing. I only have one class at the moment, and it\u2019s great being in an environment where I have so much space to work. The facilities are great, I love it here. I really enjoy being down here at the Museum.<\/p>\n

I\u2018ve got a workspace up at the Department of Biology<\/a> at Gloshaugen too, but I mainly spend time down here. The environment, the people here, there\u2019s a smaller team, you get to know people, there\u2019s a real sense of community.<\/p>\n

\"Photo
Ida Mienna has a master’s project that involves quite a bit of lab work. Photo: Ingegjerd Meyer Hellevig.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe facilities are great, I love it here. I really enjoy being down here at the Museum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming to Trondheim<\/h2>\n

What brought you to Trondheim initially?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the main reasons I came here was that I\u2019d heard about the student life. Since I\u2019m from the north, just east of Tromso, I had the easy choice of going to UiT, it\u2019s three hours from my hometown. But I\u2019d heard so many good things about Trondheim, they facilitate a lot for students, and there are so many different sports you can do, there\u2019s always something on. It\u2019s really amazing.<\/p>\n

Did you study here before your masters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, I started my Bachelor of Biology here in 2013. It was three years, and I started my Masters in Ecology, Evolution, Biosystematics and Behaviour<\/a> directly afterwards.<\/p>\n

How have you enjoyed your Master\u2019s course so far?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been great! I\u2019d had so many theory courses in my Bachelor degree, so I wanted to get as much practical experience as possible. So I\u2019ve chosen courses for my Masters which are more fieldwork based, more. I\u2019ve taken study-design courses, and data analysis courses. I really enjoyed my special syllabus as well. It was essentially preparation for my thesis, it took me deeper into biosystematics and phylogeny. We had the chance for a bit of fieldwork, some of it with James Speed<\/a>, who I\u2019d already learnt from in my Bachelor\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

ECO-BAR and finding a supervisor<\/h2>\n

You\u2019re currently completing your master\u2019s thesis with James. How did that come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the last semester of our Bachelor\u2019s, we have a day called Eco-Bar, where different professors come and talk about their projects for a few minutes. James presented his project, and I went to talk to him afterwards, as he\u2019s a really good professor and a great teacher. I thought he\u2019d make an excellent supervisor. I really like community ecology, the big picture of biology, and James works on an ecosystem scale, which was perfect. I knew that I didn\u2019t want to work with one specific species, rather on the whole picture.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really like community ecology, the big picture of biology, and James works on an ecosystem scale, which was perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

I told James what my interests were and asked if he had any ideas, and then he invited me down to the Museum and proposed the project that we\u2019re currently working on. I decided on the project last May, before I\u2019d started classes, and started work on it last August, when the semester kicked off. Mike Martin<\/a> came on board as a second supervisor just after I started.<\/p>\n

Tell me a bit about your project.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to see if there are areas in Norway where there\u2019s higher diversity and endemism compared to species occurrence and abundance. We\u2019re looking more at phylogenetic diversity which is based on evolutionary history. What I\u2019ve seen with a preliminary phylogeny is that some species are a lot more related than we thought they were, so it\u2019s really cool to see new results!<\/p>\n

I also hope to identify regions in Norway that may have been refugia during the last glacial maximum using the spatial phylogenetics method as I expect localities like these to have higher phylogenetic endemism than others.<\/p>\n

\"Photo
Ida mienna is sampling old herbarium samples like this one, and extracts genetic information so that she can build a phylogeny of norwegian vascular plants. With the resulting phylogenetic tree she can identify geographic areas with high endemism. Photo: Ingegjerd Meyer Hellevig.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How have you enjoyed working with Mike, James and Mika?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Really good. They\u2019re really helpful and they\u2019re really effective teachers. I get a lot of experience working with them that I just wouldn\u2019t be able to gain elsewhere. They have given me the opportunity to go to Stockholm for a symposium in November about the natural history of Scandinavia and also to Oslo for the Norwegian ecological society conference this January to present my preliminary results.<\/p>\n

New skills and the future<\/h2>\n

What sort of resources are you working with?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m working with about 200 herbarium samples. I get some here in Trondheim, but we have to loan some from other herbaria in Norway. Mika Bendiksby<\/a>, our herbarium\u2019s curator, is another of my co-supervisors, and she\u2019s a guest researcher at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. If I was to borrow the samples directly it would have been a nightmare, but Mika is well connected at the Museum in Oslo and borrows directly from their herbarium.<\/p>\n

I also work with GenBank, which is a repository for genetic sequences. I took a course on Biosystematics and Biogeography during my Bachelor\u2019s, and I learnt a lot about sequencing and GenBank then. I also work with GBIF, which is an online database which you can download occurrence data from, where people have seen a plant or animal and reported back. Again, I\u2019d been introduced to that in my Bachelor\u2019s, but it\u2019s easy to learn and I picked up most of my skills during my Master\u2019s work. I also use Lid\u2019s Norsk Flora <\/em>a fair bit, which is the go-to for flora in Norway.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really love Biology and I want to be a scientist, so I\u2019m really motivated to do a PhD.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your plan once you\u2019ve finished sequencing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be sending off my PCR for the three genetic markers that I\u2019m using to either Macrogen or Eurofins to do Sanger sequencing in June. Then I\u2019ll get the data back in late August and be able to start aligning the sequences, and constructing the phylogeny. Then I\u2019ll be able to combine this with the occurrence data and identify areas in Norway with more or less phylogenetic diversity.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really love Biology and I want to be a scientist, so I\u2019m really motivated to do a PhD. I love student life here and I\u2019d love to stay in Trondheim for a PhD.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ida Mienna is a 23-year old Master\u2019s student at NTNU University, currently writing her thesis on plant phylogenies at the Department of Natural History at NTNU University Museum. I spoke with Ida about why she chose the museum for her thesis, her experiences thus far and what she has planned for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[49,50],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-and-interviews","tag-genetics","tag-master-project","byline-sam-perrin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions\/322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}