Linda Mansour

The Blade’s recent editorial on Lucas County’s Israel bond dispute called the matter political squabbling. That is, to borrow a phrase, frosting on a mud pie, an attempt to sweeten the surface while ignoring what lies beneath. What’s at stake is not personality clashes or partisan posturing, but a serious question about whether taxpayer dollars are being invested responsibly, fairly, and in the interest of the people of Lucas County.

Abstract While DNA has built the framework for molecular insights from museum collections, the utility of archival RNA remains largely unexplored. Likely a consequence of the known instability of RNA relative to DNA, this has effectively nullified the use of herbaria for transcriptomics. Here, we challenge the assumption that herbaria cannot be used for transcriptomics by assembling transcriptomes from RNA extracted from herbarium specimens.