836 Pitt undergraduates contributed data for a new study on plants and pollution

Two heads are better than one. So how about several hundred?

Biologists in Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences - with the help of 836 undergraduates - recently published a paper showing how doubling their genome can help plants survive in harsh environments.

"No one had done anything at this scale in this field," said Martin Turcotte, assistant professor of biology and lead author of the paper. "It was a ton of work, and really a collaborative effort."

That collaboration started in 2018, when instructors in the Department of Biological Sciences were tasked with making introductory lab courses into authentic research experiences. Turcotte, who uses the tiny and fast-growing pond plant duckweed to study how organisms evolve, saw an opportunity to incorporate his lab research into the curriculum. Thus began the Duckweed Survivor course.

What started as a handful of classes has ballooned into 47 class sections, 14 instructors and hundreds of students each semester. And after the spring 2023 semester, Turcotte saw he had a dataset he could immediately publish.

The team, including Department of Biological Sciences faculty members Katie Wagner, Nancy Kaufmann and Tia-Lynn Ashman along with PhD student Taylor Zalleck, published their results in the journal Evolution Letters.