Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of Indefensibleplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I'm doing great because joining us today is Dr. Blaine Marchant, who is here to talk to us about sequencing a fern genome. Now, anytime you sequence a genome, it's super exciting because we're learning about

what makes life possible. But ferns are a special case because they have massive,

absolutely massive, unwieldy genomes. They've largely been overlooked in this realm, and there's

just so many cool things to learn, including stealing genes from other unrelated organisms like bacteria.

I'm going to let Dr. Marchant tell you all about it.

But before we get to that, I just want to say, consider supporting this podcast on Patreon

because I would not be doing this podcast each and every week if it wasn't for the support

of my patrons over at patreon.com slash indefensive plants.

They make this show possible so if you're

enjoying it please thank them but yeah so many exciting things to talk about today i don't want to

belay it anymore so let's just jump right into it without further ado here's my conversation

with dr marchand i hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Blaine Marchant, it is so great to have you on the podcast.

I'm really excited to talk to you about your work today, but let's start off with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do. So thanks for having me, Matt. It's a real pleasure to be chatting with you. So I am

currently a postdoc at Stanford. I've kind of made the switch to corn and kind of more single-cell

RNA-seek and kind of more developmental biology at the moment. Whereas my PhD was at the University

of Florida with Doug and Pam Soltas, which I really focused on fern genome evolution, kind of

putting to, it was basically the beginning for this serotopter's genome, which just came out.

And so my future, my kind of plan in the future is to kind of combine both my PhD research along with the

single cell RNA seek and a lot of the tools I'm learning in my postdoc right now. But that's all

future. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? But for the meantime, taking a break from massive genomes, right? Yep. Yeah, exactly.

Well, now that this is done, a little break. Yeah. Cool. And so what brought you to this line of work?

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