Courtney J. Murren

Courtney J. Murren
College of Charleston | C of C · Department of Biology

PhD

About

67
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3,689
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January 2005 - present
College of Charleston
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (67)
Chapter
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p dir="ltr">During the construction of the Panama Canal, forested hilltops were isolated from other forested areas by water. These islands in Lake Gatun, the largest of which is Barro Colorado Island (BCI), provide an excellent study system for examining population dynamics, gene flow, and species interactions in a fragmented forest landscape. A th...
Article
Background Plant hormones influence phenology, development, and function of above and belowground plant structures. In seedlings, auxin influences the initiation and development of lateral roots and root systems. How auxin-related genes influence root initiation at early life stages has been investigated from numerous perspectives. There is a gap i...
Article
Phenology, or seasonal variation in life cycle events, is poorly described for many macroalgal species. We describe the phenology of a non‐native population of Gracilaria vermiculophylla whose thalli are free‐living or anchored by decorating polychaetes to tube caps. At a site in South Carolina, USA, we sampled 100 thalli approximately every month...
Chapter
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Over a decade ago, faculty researchers at primarily undergraduate institutions embarked on a project motivated as much by questions about plant genomics as by commitment to undergraduate mentoring. The project gained funding from NSF and also an acronym: UNPAK, Undergraduates Phenotyping Arabidopsis Knockouts. The project aims to test ideas about h...
Article
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In-person undergraduate research experiences (UREs) promote students’ integration into careers in life science research. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted institutions hosting summer URE programs to offer them remotely, raising questions about whether undergraduates who participate in remote research can experience scientific integration and...
Article
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Many species introduced to non-native regions undergo profound phenotypic change, but conflicting evidence remains on the frequency of such trait differentiation. Here, we describe two phenotype categories—biomechanical material properties and organismal size—that differ between and within native Japanese and non-native North America and Europe sho...
Preprint
Full-text available
In-person undergraduate research experiences (UREs) promote students' integration into careers in life science research. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted institutions hosting summer URE programs to offer them remotely, raising questions about whether undergraduates who participate in remote research can experience scientific integration. To...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic shut down undergraduate research programs across the United States. A group of 23 colleges, universities, and research institutes hosted remote undergraduate research programs in the life sciences during Summer 2020. Given the unprecedented offering of remote programs, we carried out a study to describe and evaluate them. Usin...
Article
Premise of research. Root traits of annual plants are known to vary across environmentally manipulated conditions in controlled settings. Roots absorb nutrients and water, essential for individual function and survival. Yet how ruderal plant populations respond belowground to spatial and temporal variation in field conditions is largely unknown. Th...
Article
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Selection leaves signatures in the DNA sequence of genes, with many test statistics devised to detect its action. While these statistics are frequently used to support hypotheses about the adaptive significance of particular genes, the effect these genes have on reproductive fitness is rarely quantified experimentally. Consequently, it is unclear h...
Article
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Stomata are essential pores flanked by guard cells that control gas exchange in plants. We can utilize stomatal size and density measurements as a proxy for a plant’s capacity for gas exchange. While stomatal responses to stressful environments are well studied; data are lacking in the responses across mutant genotypes of the same species in these...
Preprint
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The COVID-19 pandemic shut down undergraduate research programs across the U.S. Twenty-three sites offered remote undergraduate research programs in the life sciences during summer 2020. Given the unprecedented offering of remote research experiences, we carried out a study to describe and evaluate these programs. Using structured templates, we doc...
Article
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Undergraduates phenotyping Arabidopsis knockouts (unPAK) is a biology research network that has provided undergraduate research experiences (URE) since 2010. In 2019, unPAK expanded to include a summer URE that engaged undergraduate researchers from across the network in an intensive collaborative program. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 20...
Article
The genomic variation of an invasive species may be affected by complex demographic histories and evolutionary changes during the invasion. Here, we describe the relative influence of bottlenecks, clonality, and population expansion in determining genomic variability of the widespread red macroalga Agarophyton vermiculophyllum. Its introduction fro...
Article
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Biology research is becoming increasingly dependent on large-scale, "big data," networked research initiatives. At the same time, there has been a corresponding effort to expand undergraduate participation in research to benefit student learning and persistence in science. This essay examines the confluence of this trend through eight years of a co...
Article
For many taxa, including isomorphic haplodiplontic macroalgae, determining sex and ploidy is challenging, thereby limiting the scope of some population demographic and genetic studies. Here, we used double digest restriction site‐associated DNA sequencing (ddRAD‐seq) to identify sex‐linked molecular markers in the widespread red alga Agarophyton ve...
Article
Mutation is a key force in evolutionary ecology. While the source of new genetic variation, mutation is often considered separately from other mechanisms. This commentary accompanies the mini-special issue/topical collection to draw attention to mutation in evolutionary ecology. We highlight each of the diverse papers, and provide context for futur...
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Transposable elements are a nearly ubiquitous component of eukaryotic genomes. While often described as parasitic genetic elements, other evidence suggests that transposable elements can become domesticated and contribute to organismal function. There is little empirical data on the positive or negative contribution of transposable elements to orga...
Article
Premise: In the complex soil nutrient environments of wild populations of annual plants, in general, low nutrient availability restricts growth and alters root-shoot relationships. However, our knowledge of natural selection on roots in field settings is limited. We sought to determine whether selection acts directly on root traits and to identify...
Article
Premise of research. Root traits are influenced by a large number of genes, many of which are environmentally sensitive. Despite a growing body of knowledge on root architecture, we have limited understanding of how mutations in genes affecting root traits at the seedling stage influence root traits and performance of ruderal species across nutrien...
Article
Premise: Determining how species perform in novel climatic environments is essential for understanding (1) responses to climate change and (2) evolutionary consequences of biological invasions. For the vast majority of species, the number of population characteristics that will predict performance and patterns of natural selection in novel locatio...
Article
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We present a curriculum description, an initial student outcome investigation, and sample scientific results for a representative Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) that is part of the "Undergraduates Phenotyping Arabidopsis Knockouts" (unPAK) network. CUREs in the unPAK network characterize quantitative phenotypes of the model p...
Article
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Organisms are faced with variable environments and one of the most common solutions to cope with such variability is phenotypic plasticity, a modification of the phenotype to the environment. These modifications are commonly modelled in evolutionary theories as adaptive, influencing ecological and evolutionary processes. If plasticity is adaptive,...
Article
Determining how genes are associated with traits in plants and other organisms is a major challenge in modern biology. The unPAK project — undergraduates Phenotyping Arabidopsis Knockouts — has generated phenotype data for thousands of non‐lethal insertion mutation lines within a single Arabidopsis thaliana genomic background. The focal phenotypes...
Preprint
Full-text available
Organisms are faced with variable environments and one of the most common solutions to cope with such variability is phenotypic plasticity, a modification of the phenotype to the environment. These modifications influence ecological and evolutionary processes and are assumed to be adaptive. The assumption of adaptive plasticity allows to derive the...
Article
Full-text available
Theory predicts that the maintenance of haplodiplontic life cycles requires ecological differences between the haploid gametophytes and diploid sporophytes, yet evidence of such differences remain scarce. The haplodiplontic red seaweed Gracilaria vermiculophylla has invaded the temperate estuaries of the Northern Hemisphere, where it commonly modif...
Article
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Rapid evolution of non-native species can facilitate invasion success, but recent reviews indicate that such microevolution rarely yields expansion of the climatic niche in the introduced habitats. However, because some invasions originate from a geographically restricted portion of the native species range and its climatic niche, it is possible th...
Article
Premise of the study: Studies on phenotypic plasticity and plasticity of integration have uncovered functionally linked modules of aboveground traits and seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana, but we lack details about belowground variation in adult plants. Functional modules can be comprised of additional suites of traits that respond to environmenta...
Article
Screens of organisms with disruptive mutations in a single gene often fail to detect phenotypic consequences for the majority of mutants. One explanation for this phenomenon is that the presence of paralogous loci provides genetic redundancy. However, it is also possible that the assayed traits are affected by few loci, that effects could be subtle...
Article
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Since the groundbreaking work of Turesson (1922) and Clausen and colleagues (e.g., Heisey et al 1942, Nunez-Farfan and Schlichting 2001), local adaptation of plant populations has been assessed in a variety of life histories and habitats. Several reviews and quantitative syntheses have determined that local adaptation is pervasive, although not uni...
Article
Plasticity has been acknowledged as having a central role in organismal evolutionary responses to environments (e.g. West-Eberhard 2003; Sultan 2015; Sgrò et al. 2016). As the field of plasticity expands (Bradshaw 1965, Schlichting and Pigliucci 1998; Sultan 2015), rich datasets of reaction norm variation across organisms, trait types and ecologica...
Article
Baker's Law predicts uniparental reproduction will facilitate colonization success in novel habitats. While evidence supports this prediction among colonizing plants and animals, few studies have investigated shifts in reproductive mode in haplo-diplontic species in which both prolonged haploid and diploid stages separate meiosis and fertilization...
Article
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Phenotypic variation in ecologically important traits may vary at large and small geographic scales, and may be shaped by natural selection. Here our explicit aim is to evaluate phenotypic differentiation among local populations and examine its relationship with ecological edaphic and climatic features that could lead to local adaptation. We charac...
Article
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Purvis, K.G.; Gramling, J.M., and Murren, C.J., 2015. Assessment of beach access paths on dune vegetation: Diversity, abundance, and cover. Coastal human populations are expanding and affecting plant communities, in particular dune systems. Coastal communities face risks from storm events, while coastal dune systems are heavily affected by human po...
Article
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Phenotypic plasticity is ubiquitous and generally regarded as a key mechanism for enabling organisms to survive in the face of environmental change. Because no organism is infinitely or ideally plastic, theory suggests that there must be limits (for example, the lack of ability to produce an optimal trait) to the evolution of phenotypic plasticity,...
Thesis
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Aliphatic glucosinolates form an important class of metabolites in Brassicas whose cognate isothiocyanates may provide chemoprotective effects in humans. Although certain B. oleracea crops have well documented glucosinolate profiles, collard (Brassica oleracea L. subsp. oleracea convar. acephala var. viridis) remains relatively unexplored. Recently...
Article
After initial establishment in nonnative environments, exotic species are often found in low numbers for long periods of time. After a lag phase, a transition to an exponential growth phase is characteristic. A broad question remains: Can we identify factors that contribute to the lag phase or assess the potential for additional invasion? Our appro...
Article
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Abstract Understanding the evolution of reaction norms remains a major challenge in ecology and evolution. Investigating evolutionary divergence in reaction norm shapes between populations and closely related species is one approach to providing insights. Here we use a meta-analytic approach to compare divergence in reaction norms of closely relate...
Conference Paper
Background/Question/Methods Expanding coastal urbanization is putting increasing pressure on remnant natural habitat areas, such as coastal dune ecosystems. Dune systems are highly disturbed, shifting systems which experience salt spray, high winds, blowing sand and full sun. Studies of other remnant habitat types are not necessarily good predict...
Article
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Introduced species frequently show geographic differentiation, and when differentiation mirrors the ancestral range, it is often taken as evidence of adaptive evolution. The mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) was introduced to North America from Eurasia 150-200 years ago, providing an opportunity to study parallel adaptation in a genetic model...
Article
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Proper functioning of complex phenotypes requires that multiple traits work together. Examination of relationships among traits within and between complex characters and how they interact to function as a whole organism is critical to advancing our understanding of evolutionary developmental plasticity. Phenotypic integration refers to the relation...
Article
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Since the early 1990s, research on genetic variation of phenotypic plasticity has expanded and empirical research has emphasized the role of the environment on the expression of inbreeding depression. An emerging question is how these two evolutionary ecology mechanisms interact in novel environments. Interest in this area has grown with the need t...
Article
Questions: Does plasticity to water availability differ between native and naturalized and laboratory plant accessions? Is there a relationship between morphological plasticity and a fitness measure? Can we account for latitudinal patterns of plasticity with rainfall data from the seed source location? Organism: We examined an array of 23 native, 1...
Article
To better understand invasion dynamics, it is essential to determine the influence of genetics and ecology in species persistence in both native and nonnative habitats. One approach is to assess patterns of selection on floral and growth traits of individuals in both habitats. Mimulus guttatus (Phrymaceae) has a mixed mating system and grows under...
Article
The interrelationships among phenotypic traits of plants has been of interest to plant evolutionary biologists for almost a century. Broadly defined, phenotypic integration refers to the correlations among traits within functional units (such as a flower). In this review, the classic research of Berg (1960) on the relationships among traits within...
Article
Low Ca/Mg ratios (a defining component of serpentine soils) and low water environmental conditions often co-occur in nature and are thought to exert strong selection pressures on natural populations. However, few studies test the individual and combined effects of these environmental factors. We investigated the effects of low Ca/Mg ratio and low w...
Article
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In addition to considerable debate in the recent evolutionary literature about the limits of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, there has also been theoretical and empirical interest in a variety of new and not so new concepts such as phenotypic plasticity, genetic assimilation and phenotypic accommodation. Here we consider examples of th...
Article
At the edge of a species range, plants may experience myriad microenvironmental gradients, which may differ and impose strong yet complex selective regimes. We explore these issues using the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, a native of Europe that has naturalized in North America, which we planted in a common garden field plot in Knoxville, Ten...
Article
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Thigmomorphogenesis refers to the widespread ability of sessile organisms to modify their morphology in response to a variety of mechanical stimulations, from direct contact with the stem by insects or other plants to flexure caused by wind, water, or snow. In this paper we investigated the differences in the reaction norms to wind exposure of seve...
Article
In the preservation of plant biodiversity, there are fundamental genetic and ecological similarities involved in: (1) predicting the fate of small, isolated populations, (2) ensuring the successful reintroduction of endangered species back into natural habitats, and (3) understanding the establishment of species beyond their native ranges. In all t...
Chapter
A new voice in the nature-nurture debate can be heard at the interface between evolution and development. Phenotypic integration--or, how large numbers of characteristics are related to make up the whole organism, and how these relationships evolve and change their function--is a major growth area in research, attracting the attention of evolutiona...
Chapter
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The concept of evolvability has received increasing attention as a means of encapsulating perceptions that lineages of organisms vary not only in diversity, but also in their ability to generate such diversity. However, there has been scant attention to what the underlying components of evolvability may be. Because the raw materials for any evoluti...
Article
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The idea of genetic assimilation, that environmentally induced phenotypes may become genetically fixed and no longer require the original environmental stimulus, has had varied success through time in evolutionary biology research. Proposed by Waddington in the 1940s, it became an area of active empirical research mostly thanks to the efforts of it...
Article
— The idea of genetic assimilation, that environmentally induced phenotypes may become genetically fixed and no longer require the original environmental stimulus, has had varied success through time in evolutionary biology research. Proposed by Waddington in the 1940s, it became an area of active empirical research mostly thanks to the efforts of...
Article
Spatial and temporal genetic structures were examined across sites on islands and mainland (continuous forest) populations of an epiphytic orchid, Catasetum viridiflavum, using 17 polymorphic allozyme loci. I tested whether patches on islands or at mainland sites comprised small local populations or a large population. Low among population differen...
Article
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Phenotypic integration is a necessary characteristic of living organisms that results from genetic, developmental, and functional relationships among traits. The nature of these relationships can be influenced by the environment. We examined patterns of phenotypic integration of six species of rapid cycling Brassica and of Raphanus sativus within a...
Article
For 3 years, I examined the effects of fragmentation on pollination of an endemic, euglossine bee‐pollinated, epiphytic orchid, Catasetum viridiflavum , on 10 islands created during the construction of the Panamá Canal and at five sites in nearby large tracts of mainland forest. I investigated the viability of pollinia over time, availability of po...
Chapter
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Adaptive radiation is a diversification of a single lineage into morphologically or physiologically distinct taxa that are adapted to a certain set of environmental conditions.
Chapter
Habitat fragmentation and global climate change are the two major environmental threats to the persistence of species and ecosystems. The probability of a species surviving such changes is strongly dependent on its ability to track shifts in the environmental, either by moving between patches of habitat or by rapidly adapting to local condition. Th...
Article
Tropical forests are rapidly being dissected into small isolated fragments. However, little is known about the impacts of fragmentation on plant populations remaining in fragments. I examined effects of fragmentation on pollination, reproductive ecology and genetic structure of an endemic epiphytic orchid, Catasetum viridiflavum , on islands create...
Article
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We used mathematical models for wind-dispersed seeds and wind-tunnel experiments to predict modal seed dispersal distance of the Neotropical orchid Brassavola nodosa under conditions approximating those found in its natural habitat: mangrove islands in Belize, Central America. Key variables in a simple ballistic model for predicting modal dispersal...
Article
We examined correlatively the joint effects of light, supporting plant characteristics, plant size, and floral display on pollinia removal and fruit production of 103 individuals of the orchid Brassavola nodosa (L.) Lindl. at Peter Douglas Cay, Belize, Central America. This orchid is epiphytic on red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle L. {Rhizophoraceae}...

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