9321833 Dickison Under the direction of faculty adviser Dr. William Dickison at the University of North Carolina, graduate student Kenneth Cameron is conducting field work in South America and in the Far East to collect materials of the orchid groups related to the genus Vanilla. Morphological and molecular analyses will then yield new characters for comparative studies aimed at improving taxonomic recognition of species and genera and for inferring phylogenetic relationships among these plants. New molecular data from chloroplast DNA and from nuclear ribosomal DNA are likely to provide strong hypotheses of evolutionary relationships. In turn, knowledge of the evolutionary patterns in these orchid groups will help assess trends of evolutionary change in pollen and seeds, which are distinctive in many of the vanilloid orchids. The vanilloid orchids include the commercially important genus Vanilla as well as several presumably derived genera that have lost photosynthetic capabilities and exist as mycotrophic parasites, feeding on soil fungi on the roots of tropical forest trees. This combined morphological and molecular study will help improve our understanding of the evolution of these novel plant adaptations.
