I started graduate school with Jon Shaw at Duke University in 1998 intent on taking molecular approaches to ecological problems in bryophytes. Over the course of my graduate career my interest gradually shifted from ecology to molecular population genetics and the evolution of complex traits. My thesis work, now a semester away from completion, is focused on sexual dimorphism and the genetic basis of reproductive isolation between populations of the moss Ceratodon purpureus. I first attended a moss meeting in St. Louis when Moss2003 met subsequent to a bryophyte phylogenetics conference, in part coordinated by Brent Mishler and the NSF Deep Gene grant. Talks by, and conversations with, David Cove, Ralph Quatrano, Ralf Reski, Fred Sack and Mitsuyasu Hasebe in particular, really helped me see the potential for collaboration between population genetic and molecular genetic approaches to understanding phenotypic evolution.

The MOSS2004 conference in Freiburg was the first time I presented my work to a group of molecular-developmental biologists. Small meetings like this one are terrific for interacting with people in the field. There are plenty of opportunities to get feedback on your work from senior scientists, and they are generally pleased to share current and exciting new work under way in their labs. I was pleased to meet some of the photobiologists working with moss, like Jon Hughes, as well as authors of some of the classic papers in moss experimental biology, like Martin Bopp. A large percentage of participants are dealing with some of the same problems in growing and manipulating the mosses in culture, so it’s a great place to pick up new solutions to culturing problems. I learned my inductive conditions for producing sporophytes were not as efficient as they might be! Moreover, its very interesting to see when diverse manipulations produce similar phenotypes; I was pleased to see myosin knockout mutants that looked very much like the small-colonied hybrid progeny produced by my cross.

Mosses, any moss really, are terrific model systems for many questions in evolutionary biology. The availability of clonally replicable haploid gametophytes is a dream come true for a quantitative geneticist. Now is a particularly exciting time to be working on mosses, Physcomitrella patens in particular. As this meeting made abundantly clear, the tools for studying gene function in this moss, and perhaps others like C. purpureus, are well developed. Lacking, at least from an evolutionary genetics perspective, was a way to identify genes underlying ecologically important trait variation in nature. The availability of the Physcomitrella patens genome within the next year will bridge this gap. It may soon be possible to find the allelic variation underlying ecologically important trait variation, and provide a rigorous experimental verification of this hypothesis in the lab. This is type of work is imaginable in only a small handful of species.