ALT Macrocystis pyrifera (giant kelp) gametophyte, imaged with confocal microscopy. Many filaments of cells originate from a central point.

ALT A group of smiling people, laughing and with arms entwined

ALT Questions to Initiate Conversations at Conferences 1. What qualities do you look for in a collaborator? 2. What mistakes have taught you the most valuable lesson? 3. What do you feel passionate enough about to protest in academia? 4. How have you changed professionally in the past year? 5. If you could teach yourself any new technology in plant biology which, would you choose? 6. Which of your abilities are you most thankful for? 7. What do you hope will be the next big invention? 8. What skills make you feel proud of yourself? 9. What is the best and the worst thing about your lab environment? 10. What is the most fun conference you have attended and why? 11. If you could emulate the career of any conference attendee, who would you choose and why? 12. What high-risk, high-reward side project would you love to investigate? 13. What three things would you like to accomplish in the next three years? 14. Has technology helped simplify your research in any way?

ALT A fluorescent microscope image of a filamentous baby algae. It looks like a beautiful 1000 armed star with turquoise colored cell outlines (filaments are lines of connected cells) punctuated by magenta dots (the chloroplasts).

ALT A mature Codium fragile (CO-dee-um fra-JIL-ee) with labelled parts. Holdfast: (spongy disk, here ringed with other hair-like seaweeds); Stem-like region; Frond: The upright part of body above the holdfast, often leaf-like in overall shape. This specimen of Codium is also home to a filamentous red seaweed, Ceramium codicola, that resembles long thin red threads emerging from the Codium body. Ceramium codicola grows only on Codium fragile.

ALT A cross-section of Codium fragile showing the body’s internal construction. A “cross-section” cut reveals the different tissue layers — think of slicing a sandwich and seeing the bread, tomato, lettuce, etc. The insert photo and cartoon scissors shows where the cross-section cut was made. The body of Codium is one enormous, thin tube that branches many, many times to form “siphons”. Siphons in the middle of the body make up the “medulla” (= centre or core) and are colourless. Many short siphons called “utricles” grow from siphons in the medulla and face the outside environment. The tips of utricles are dark green because that is where most of the chloroplasts are found. Chloroplasts are special structures used for photosynthesis. The labelled parts are: Utricles (YOU-trickles), Medulla (MED-you-lah), Broken utricles. The image has been taken with a microscope and the colours are natural. Scale bar = 1mm.

ALT A close-up at higher magnification of a Codium fragile gametangium. The gametangium is very densely-coloured, a sign that it is mature and will soon release gametes into the water. The thick crosswall separating the internal contents of the gametangium from the rest of the body is clearly visible. The labelled parts are: crosswall. The image has been taken with a microscope and the colours are natural. Scale bar = 0.05mm.

ALT A cross-section of Codium fragile showing utricles and gametangia (singular: gametangium). The gametangia are darker green because there are many gametes densely packed inside, ready to be released into the water when the top of the gametangium ruptures. A single Codium fragile seaweed makes either male or female gametes inside its gametangia. The tops of utricles are often unique to each species of Codium. Codium fragile has pointy utricle tops. The labelled parts are: Utricle (YOU-trickle) and Gametangium (gah-meh-TAN-gee-um). The image has been taken with a microscope and the colours are natural. Scale bar = 0.1mm.