Analyzing Plant Wax Profiles - Can Herbarium Specimens Serve As Proxies For Globally Distributed Plant Species?
Studies of plant chemistry can make major contributions to our understanding of ecology, evolution, natural history, and even climate change. However, such studies require access to plant biodiversity, which creates a problem: gaining access to a wide variety of plant species is difficult because many plants grow in distant, remote, and difficult to access geographic areas. Fortunately, natural history museums around the world are repositories of countless preserved plant specimens collected worldwide over multiple centuries. This wealth of preserved plant specimens is an incredible source of biodiversity data, morphology, and phenology, and new methods are pushing the frontiers of museum studies, allowing for increasingly complex examination of museum specimens, which may include chemistry. One type of chemical synthesized by plants are surface waxes. Characterizing plant waxes and their synthesis pathways can offer considerable insight into ecology, evolution, natural history and even climate change. Specifically, I want to know if museum specimens (i.e., herbarium specimens) can serve as accurate analogues of the measurements generated using freshly-collected (or living) leaf material. If so, then a near-infinite source of data, in the form of museum specimens, can be leveraged in future studies of leaf surface waxes, negating the need for costly field expeditions. Comparisons were made between herbarium and field specimens for five species (Aquilegia canadensis, Convallaria majalis, Impatiens capensis, Valeriana offinialis, Ranunculus acris) and data showed wax profiles to be qualitatively similar while having some quantitative differences for four out of the five pairs.