Why study plant science?

I was one of just three plant scientists in my year. In that same year there were over 100 animal scientists. Apparently the lack of fur and cuteness makes plants extremely dull to an alarming amount of people when, in reality, plants are the reason life on Earth exists as it does today.

There’s no denying Bellsprout is fabulous

Admittedly, I was late to the whole plant science thing too, only swapping my degree in my final year from Applied Biology to Plant Science and I mainly put this down to having some excellent lectures in my second year about crop improvement and global food security.

What caught my imagination and attention was the idea that plants could solve, in my opinion, the two biggest crises the human population is attempting to overcome. Firstly, feeding an ever-growing population of humans, alongside all the animals we keep as well; secondly, our dependency on finite fossil fuels.

National Geographic recently published an interesting series based around how we can possibly feed 9 billion people in 2050, which introduces some wonderful ideas about how to begin this momentous task:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/

Whilst their 5 step plan would certainly help alleviate the pressure on food production it would not completely resolve the problem.

But there are many options that could! We have already exhausted the efficiency of using fertilisers on crops, and simply piling more onto our farmers fields will not increase yields; it will just pollute the groundwater and nearby rivers. However, we could improve how efficiently crops use the nitrogen from the fertiliser during growth. GM and non-GM methods are available to do this and many experts are already working on solutions.

In terms of alternative energy sources I personally find algal fuel the most exciting! Algae is a unique organism that can be microscopic but is most commonly recognised as seaweed.

It is a simple plant with no roots or leaves but it can photosynthesize up to 30 times faster than some crop plants, removing CO2 and pollutants from the air as it goes and releasing oxygen as a by-product.

It can grow in salt water and requires no soil meaning that algal farms can be grown on land which is completely unsuitable for arable crops .It can also be used to make biofuels.

Well this sounds too good

The main downside of this incredible technology currently is the cost. Converting the energy algae produces into a usable form currently puts it out of reach for most developing countries, however its certainly something to keep an eye out for in the future!

This is a link to a great video about the uses of algae to help over come our dependency on oil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ih-DLurcZA

That’s a very brief insight to just two small ways plant science can help shape the future, hope you enjoyed 🙂

The Reality of Doing a PhD (The Early Days)

So I stayed on to study a PhD at the same campus I studied my undergraduate course and I will be the first to admit that watching all my friends talk about travelling and their new jobs was the worst self-inflicted torture. The countless uploads of photos from said travels could easily send me into a spiral of darkness and jealousy as I realised I am now in my 18th year of education and have at least 3 more to go!

Classic questions such as, “What is your thesis on again?” resulting in me (for at least the 489th time) trying to explain the basics of wheat genetics followed by, “So what job do you plan to do once your finished?” is enough for me to want to bang my head against a wall!
Just to clarify, a PhD is a real job! We don’t get massive holidays at Christmas or Easter (bonus point, we also don’t have exams! YIPPEE!), we also tend to miss out on weekends when experiments start piling up, but we are responsible for our own progress and success.

Getting “The Guilts” is a phrase my fellow PhDers have recently started using. Any time not spent thinking about what next step the research could take or how to improve that last experiment results in a serious self-mental telling-off, followed by hours of feeling like you don’t deserve to be on the programme or that you’re a scientist imposter who looks the part but has no real idea what’s going on!

I totally know what I’m doing…

We’re really quite hard on ourselves, and yet  we’ve thrown ourselves into a world with experts in their respective fields and very little introductory literature on topics that are ultra-specific. Our workloads exponentially increase and demonstrating in labs for undergraduates who still smell of last nights drinking excursions is enough to make you die a little inside.

Please pay attention so I can teach you and leave.

And yet, for all my moaning, there is something fulfilling about doing a PhD. The opportunity to become an expert in a field you have chosen and to actually carry out experiments you have planned from start to finish is brilliant. Suddenly those hours spent planning and fretting melt away and are replaced with research and data that you have done yourself!

Getting a stipend to research something that could impact agriculture and help alleviate the food problem currently facing the global population is satisfying to me (even though that money seems to fly out my hands every pay day).
Also, having access to some of the latest research papers and slowly understanding all of that jargon scientists love to use means brain points for me!
The reality is a PhD is my first real job in the scientific research sector. It is terrifying, a lot of hard work and extremely rewarding all at the same time. The fact that my cohort of friends has moved on to something new seems to be terrifying them equally as much, regardless of what job sector they’re in. To top if off, in four years time I get to wear the goofiest graduation outfit, become a Dr and potentially continue to impact my chosen area of expertise. It’s been an interesting few months with plenty of ups and downs already, but I’m glad I chose to stay in education and can honestly say that I enjoy what I do for a living. Roll on the next 4 years and once again, Merry Christmas!

We have lift off!

I feel a little late to this whole blogging thing so please bear with me whilst I get into the swing of writing. My name is Lauren Baker and I am a 21 year old PhD student in Plant Science at the University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington campus. I spent my undergraduate years at the same campus studying first Applied Biology before swapping to Plant Science in my third year (but that’s another blog all together!).

I hope to write a blog showing you not just what I am studying, but exactly what a PhD entails; believe it or not we don’t get the massive holidays undergraduates do and yes, it is a real job! (Rant over).

It’s nearly Christmas and I’ve been working on my PhD officially since the 1^st October 2014, although I was a bit keen and started looking around the week before and found my desk!. It is now suitably messy!  

I have joined a team of scientists working on wheat crop improvement using genetics, but not GMOs. I personally have no qualms with GMOs, they have vast potential to help feed an ever growing population, however our work is different. We are simply looking at genetic variation already existing in the wheat population and in its wild relatives such as rye and tall wheatgrass.

Current global issues facing crop production include drought, diseases, pests, salinity increases, soil structure destruction and nutrient deficiency. Imagine you have a field where you grow wheat and in one year you lose over 50% of your crop due to severe drought. Obviously a wheat crop with natural, improved drought tolerance would be an attractive concept for you to plant the following year!

Using genetic concepts we can identify relatives of wheat with this natural tolerance and then crossbreed this relative with common bread wheat in an attempt to produce drought resistance offspring.

I have spent a lot of my three months on the job so far researching previous work done on wheat and there really are some fantastic papers out there:

Shewry P.R. (2009) Wheat: Darwin Review. Journal of Experimental Botany 60, 1537-1553.

This paper is a great review to get the ball rolling in terms of understanding what makes wheat such an attractive crop today and how it evolved. Whilst researching all this work I have produced my first literature review on the topic, identifying exactly which wild relative I am going to be working on and what I hope to achieve. If anybody wishes to read it in full (its really not amazing) please just ask and Ill happily send it out.

I have also spent a great deal of time learning my basic skills needed for the next four years. Emasculation is the first of these three skills – it involves removing all of the stamen (male parts) of the wheat ears before they start producing pollen. This prevents the wheat plant from self-pollinating itself and requires some supreme tweezer skills. Below is a picture I took of a wheat ear after I had removed the green stamen – the white fluffy bit on show is the stigma (female part).

It’s a fiddly job! For every stigma shown there are three stamen that circle it and ideally you want to avoid damaging the stigma whilst getting the stamen from around it!

Once emasculated we contain the wheat ear in a plastic bag to prevent any cross-pollination from neighbouring wheat plants we don’t manage to emasculate on time.

After a few days of maturing, this wheat head is now ready for pollination. Going back to our drought resistance analagy, at this stage you would select a drought resistant wheat relative plant that is giving off pollen. You then remove stamen from this plant and gently “shake” or “rub” the stamen onto the stigma of the wheat plant, hopefully causing pollination! (There’s a few more steps involved in this bit but Ill go into that another time otherwise you’ll be reading all day!)

The third and final job is threshing. This happens after you harvest the wheat ears and place them in another bag as shown below.
Threshing is a very simple job done in the lab where a radio is essential in keeping you going. You carefully open each piece of the ear to see if seed has grown and separate the seeds into their own little pile. The only thing you have to avoid is the clouds of dead bugs that sometimes accompany the ear into the lab!
The picture below shows you a wheat ear with a seed still inside (its the darker brown bit).
Hopefully when you’re done you’ll have a nice little pile of seeds which you store in their own bag with what they are on it, how many seeds you’ve collected and the date you collected them on! Job done!

Sorry this first post has been so long but I thought I’d get the basics out the way first and not bore you with them later.

Thank you to anyone who reads and I wish you a very Merry Christmas!