300130 UE Collaborative research project (2016W)

Strengthen your skills in establishing and managing a scientific collaboration, from lab work to manuscript writing. The advancement of science has brought increasing specialization and as a consequence, the need for collaboration in order to carry out broader projects. Collaborating requires skills and mindsets that are not usually taught. This course aims at filing this gap. In this course, you will study flower evolution by making use of the toolkit of structural botany. Classical tool will be available to you (scanning electron microscope, and microtome serial sectioning), but High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography (HRXCT) will be the method central to this course. HRXCT allows the acquisition of 3D datasets, and allows the study of the evolution of flower shape via advanced 3D rendering software. You will be provided introduction to the methods, and questions of the project, presented with the tasks to accomplish and you will chose how to divide them among attendees. The final aim of the course is to submit a paper to an ISI journal.