Taz Mueller

What’s your hometown?

I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado.

What are you currently working on?

The Bell Museum graduate student award through the Dayton Fund allowed me to establish a common garden experiment of Clarkia xantiana, a narrowly endemic annual wildflower native to the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, in order to study their fungal leaf communities. I am studying the factors that drive the assembly of foliar fungal endophyte communities, which are diverse, non-pathogenic fungal microbes living in plant leaves that can have a variety of effects on their hosts. I planted recombinant inbred lines of Clarkia xantiana ssp. parviflora, a selfing subspecies of C. xantiana in native populations, and manipulated them by applying supplemental watering and foliar fungicide. The purpose of this experiment was to untangle the interactions between host phenotype and host microbial community while controlling for genetic and environmental variation.

Where are you working on research/field work?

My field sites span an 80 km area within the Kern Canyon in Kern County and Tulare County, in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills of California. It’s a beautiful area that contains a lot of different biomes, including chaparral, riparian zones, hilly rangeland, desert scrub, and oak savannah.

What will your next steps/research be?

2022 concluded the fieldwork portion of my dissertation, so I’m currently working on labwork to extract DNA from the samples I collected. Once I’ve finished that, I will get them sequenced, and move forward on data analysis and writing up my findings.

What would be the 5 song soundtrack to your research work/What 5 songs do you listen to most while you work?

One of my and my labmates’ favorite ways to keep our spirits up when we’re all covered in dirt and sweat and doing tough fieldwork in 100° heat is to find songs that are relevant to our field sites and tasks, and sometimes make goofy changes to their lyrics to make them fit the context. We all curate a Spotify playlist together, and then play it on a speaker and sing along while we’re working outside. Some highlights include:

• “We Built This City” by Starship

We modified it to “We Built Grid City”, in honor of having affixed 960 metal grids into rocky hillsides to plant our experimental seeds in.

• “Womanizer” by Britney Spears

This was changed to “Randomizer” while we were randomizing replicates among treatment blocks. 

• “Glycerine” by Bush

This was coined after an ordeal where we visited four different rural drugstores in an (unsuccessful) attempt to find liquid glycerine to use for preserving floral microbial communities.

• “Dancing Queen” by ABBA

We adjusted it to “Planting Queen” and played on repeat while we were planting seeds.

• “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” by Caroline Polachek

This remained unchanged, to reflect our feelings on having to get up early to work during heat waves.