Understanding how how plants talk with each other is the focus of research at the University of Arizona to engineer plants that have a better chance of surviving in a warmer world.
1 of 2 Rebecca Mosher is the lead investigator for the University of Arizona team taking part in a multi-university project to understand how plants communicate with their environment.
The “very fancy blender” is part of a project conducted by scientists at the UA to understand how plants talk with each other. The ultimate goal is to engineer plants to help them survive a warmer world. UA received $3.5 million to study plant genes and how they react biologically to their environment. The team will use data analytics, but as the project starts up, they want to understand the language of plants first.“They might be sending those signals internally within the body of the plant to help the shoots understand what’s going on in the roots,” said Rebecca Mosher, the lead investigator on the CROPPS project for UA.
“You can’t always go by the looks or how big its brain is, but how much it can alter itself in order to fix the environment and with it in which it has to live,” Woodson said. “It’s going to have to deal with that at a very genetic level. So they need lots of genes and a lot of information stored in those cells to be able to grow and do well.”
The tissue homogenizer — a rod with sharp teeth at the end — is one of the most important devices researchers use because it cuts through the tough plant tissue to get to a plant’s cells. Inside those cells are chloroplasts, which are responsible for sensing light in its environment and performing photosynthesis.
From there, the scientists can find which genes are responsible for helping the plant grow in harsh environments, then crosspollinate plants to respond similarly. Salazar De Leon is working to prove that removing a particular gene that encodes for a specific enzyme can kill a plant. He hopes to find those patterns in other plants as well.
Last year was the sixth warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. And 2020 was even hotter — it was the second-warmest year on record. Temperatures in December 2021 made it the fifth-warmest December in 142 years.
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