PhD Student Selected as a Winner of the 2017 Wiki Science Competition

PhD student Asja Radja’s image, "Three Species Pollen Grains,” was selected as one of the 25 winners of the 2017 Wiki Science Competition in the United States and will represent the United States at the international level.  The cover image is a scanning electron micrograph of false-colored Passiflora (passionvine), Spathiphyllum (peace lily), and Aster (daisy) pollen showing intraspecific pattern stability and interspecific pattern variation. Lavrentovich et al. report that these patterns on pollen grains may be part of a broader class of biological patterns that result from first-order phase transitions on the surfaces of spherical cells.