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UArizona studying plants' communication with their environment – Cronkite News

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TUCSON – The machine, with sharp teeth and a long metal rod, sounds like a kitchen blender, but this is far from your average appliance.

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“This is a tissue homogenizer,” said Jesse Woodson, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Plant Sciences.

The “very fancy blender” is part of a project conducted by scientists at UArizona to understand how plants talk with each other. The ultimate goal is to engineer plants to help them survive a warmer world.

“We want to be able to establish communication with plants,” Woodson said. “And in order to do that, we need to know how plants are thinking about their environment and be able to sense their environment.”

Woodson and his team of students working in the lab are part of a much larger network of researchers. The National Science Foundation in October gave a $25 million grant to teams at UArizona, Cornell University and the Boyce Thompson Institute, both in New York, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to study plant communication in hopes of modifying plants for a future environment that’s likely to be warmer and drier.

(Audio by Emma VandenEinde/Cronkite News)

Their research is part of the foundation’s new Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems, or CROPPS. The scientists are working to better predict and manipulate agriculture at the molecular level to improve productivity and sustainability, according to the National Science Foundation. The transdisciplinary effort brings together scientists, engineers and computer scientists to create electronic systems that can monitor and control the responses of plants.

UArizona 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.

Although their communication is not audible, plants send internal signals all the time.

“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 UArizona. “They might be sending those signals to microbes in the soil to try to recruit those microbes. And so we want to understand those signals so that we can maybe tap into them and communicate with the plants ourselves.”

These internal signals are similar to the signals our brains send us when we are stressed or in need of nutrition. However, Woodson said, plants lack one response that humans have. Plants can’t move.

“If we want to get away from something, we can run away. But a plant has to stay there and they have to deal with whatever happens,” he said. “So if it’s a hot day, it’s a dry day, there’s too much sun, if there’s not enough sun, the plant needs to do something about that in order to grow.”

When the plant is forced to grow in one spot, it creates a “survival guide” that it passes down to the next plant, which then learns how to conserve resources and adapt to its environment.

“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.”

Rebecca Mosher is the lead investigator for the UArizona team participating in a multi-university project funded by the National Science Foundation to understand how plants communicate with their environment. (Photo by Emma VandenEinde/Cronkite News)

Experimenting to understand

Before the plants —which include rice and soybeans —enter the lab, they grow in greenhouses on the roof of a parking garage south of the Tucson campus. In those greenhouses, the plants’ environment is altered.

“We might give it very high light or lots of heat, a whole variety of abiotic stresses,” Mosher said. “We can also infect it with pathogens, so a biotic stress. And then we’ll collect that tissue and take it into the laboratory.”

Inside the lab, the team extracts cells using different methods – from spinning plants in a centrifuge to jostling them in vials filled with beads. Then researchers look at cells under the microscope.

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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.

“A lot of what we’re trying to look at is how components within cells, how cells do photosynthesis and respond to the environment,” Woodson said. “This homogenizer is basically a very fancy blender that breaks open the cells so we can pull out those chloroplasts to do experiments in the lab.”

Cristian Salazar De Leon, one of the graduate students on Woodson’s team, said the chloroplasts can reveal a lot about how plants react in high heat situations.

“Most of us look into a pathway where chloroplasts do the photosynthesis in plant cells (and look at) how they’re recycled, how they’re damaged and how the plant deals with those damaged cells,” Salazar De Leon said.

From there, the scientists can find which genes are responsible for helping the plant grow in harsh environments, then cross-pollinate 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.

“This is just like one piece of an entire biochemical pathway that allows plants to be able to respond to UV light stress,” he said.

Cristian Salazar De Leon cross-pollinates Arabidopsis plants under the microscope. The small flowering plants lack a gene that helps them live under high-stress conditions. (Photo by Emma VandenEinde/Cronkite News)

Arizona’s climate perfect for testing

Although the NSF-funded universities each have their own lab for testing, Arizona’s climate offers a unique environment for experimentation.

“Our environment is incredibly hot, incredibly arid, the world is going to be turning more and more like Arizona as the planet heats up,” Woodson said.

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.

As temperatures increase because of human activity that contributes to global warming, these experiments with plants could help scientists better support plants and crops in the future that are more resilient to temperature changes.

“If we can understand how plants grow with limited water in really hot environments, perhaps we can create new breeds and varieties that would be able to grow better,” Woodson said.

The UArizona project is expected to last five years. More research, the scientists say, could unlock more about plants and how they are adapting to climate change.

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Local astronomer urges the public to look up – Windsor News Today – windsornewstoday.ca

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April 18, 2024

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If last week’s solar eclipse piqued your interest in astronomy, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Windsor Chapter plans to show off some of the more dramatic photos and videos members took of the event.

They were stationed along the path of totality along the northern shore of Lake Erie and in the U.S.

“People did take some nice photos with their cellphones, but we have members who took photos and videos with their telescopes,” said member Tom Sobocan. “You’ll see some pretty impressive shots.”

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About 100 members are in the local chapter, which meets every third Tuesday of every month.

Thursday’s meeting is at the Ojibway Nature Centre on Matchette Road. It starts at 7:30, and it’s open to the public. Seating is limited, so Sobocan recommends arriving early.

Astronomers are looking ahead to new wonders in the heavens. Right now, the Pons-Brooks Comet, another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is approaching Jupiter in the constellation of Aries.

“If you’re in a dark-sky location, you can see it with the naked eye, and from inside the city, you can see it with binoculars,” said Sobocan. “It may get a little bit brighter going towards the fall, but our members have already photographed it with their telescopes.”

It’s a periodic comet which appears in the night sky once every 71 years.

Sobocan said once-in-a-lifetime events, like last week’s eclipse, inspired many of its existing members, but he hopes some new ones will join the group.

“I hope it inspires them to look up at the sky a little bit more often and realize that everything’s in motion in the sky,” he said. “It’s not stationary.”

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Giant, 82-foot lizard fish discovered on UK beach could be largest marine reptile ever found – Livescience.com

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April 17, 2024

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Scientists have unearthed the remains of a gigantic, 200 million-year-old sea monster that may be the largest marine reptile ever discovered.

The newfound creature is a member of a group called ichthyosaurs, which were among the dominant sea predators during the Mesozoic era (251.9 million to 66 million years ago). The newly described species lived during the end of the Triassic period (251.9 million to 201.4 million years ago).

Ichthyosaurs had already attained massive sizes by the early portion of the Mesozoic, but it was not until the late Triassic that the largest species emerged.

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While the Mesozoic is known as the age of the dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs were not themselves dinosaurs. Instead, they evolved from another group of reptiles. Their evolutionary path closely mirrors that of whales, which evolved from terrestrial mammals that later returned to the sea. And like whales, they breathed air and gave birth to live young.

The newly discovered ichthyosaur species was unearthed in pieces between 2020 and 2022 at Blue Anchor, Somerset in the United Kingdom. The first chunk of the fossil was noticed atop a rock on the beach, indicating that a passerby had found it and set it there for others to examine, the researchers explained in the paper. The researchers published their findings April 17 in the journal PLOS One.

The reptile’s remains are made up of a series of 12 fragments from a surangular bone, which is found in the upper portion of the lower jaw. The researchers estimate the bone was 6.5 feet (2 meters) long and that the living animal was about 82 feet (25 m) long.

The researchers named the sea monster Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning giant lizard fish of the Severn, after the Severn Estuary where it was found. The team believes it is not only a new species but an entirely new genus of ichthyosaur. More than 100 species are already known.

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A giant pair of swimming Ichthyotitan severnensis. (Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto, CC-BY 4.0)

A number of rib fragments and a coprolite, or fossilized feces, were found in the area as well, but they were not definitively attributed to the same animal.

The sediments in which these specimens were found contained rocks that indicated earthquakes and tsunamis occurred during that time, which suggests that this species lived during a time of intense volcanic activity that may have led to a massive extinction event at the end of the Triassic according to the researchers.

A similar specimen was discovered in Lilstock, Somerset in 2016 and described in 2018. Both were found in what is known at the Westbury Mudstone Formation, within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of each other. This ichthyosaur was estimated to have been as much as 85 feet (26 m) long, although the authors of the latest study believe it was slightly smaller.

The previous contender for the largest marine reptile was another ichthyosaur, Shonisaurus sikanniensis, which was up to 69 feet (21 m) long. S. sikanniensis appeared 13 million years earlier than I. severnensis and was found in British Columbia, making it unlikely that the new discovery represents another specimen of the previously known species.

A similarly massive ichthyosaur called Himalayasaurus tibetensis, which may have reached lengths of 49 feet (15 m), was discovered in Tibet and described in 1972. It dates to the same period, meaning that it probably is not the same species as the new discovery either.

I. severnensis was likely among the last of the giant ichthyosaurs, the researchers claim. Ichthyosaurs persisted into the Cenomanian Age (100.5 million to 93.9 million years ago) of the late Cretaceous period (100.5 million to 66 million years ago). They were eventually supplanted by plesiosaurs — long-necked marine reptiles that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, alongside all non-avian dinosaurs.

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Federal government announces creation of National Space Council | RCI – Radio-Canada.ca

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April 17, 2024

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The Canadian Space Agency also received a proposed $8.6 million for its lunar program

Posted: April 17, 2024 7:57 PM

Nicole Mortillaro (new window) · CBC News

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Canada’s space sector received a boost from the federal government in its budget, both in terms of money and vision.

The 2024 budget (new window) included a proposal for $8.6 million in 2024-25 to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (new window) (LEAP), which invests in technologies for humanity’s return to the moon and beyond.

In addition to the funding, the federal government also announced the creation of a National Space Council, which will be a new whole-of-government approach to space exploration, technology development, and research.

For Space Canada (new window), an organization comprised of roughly 80 space sector companies including some of Canada’s largest, such as Magellan Aerospace (new window), Maritime Launch (new window) and MDA Space (new window), it was a welcome announcement.

We’ve been advocating for it since the inception of our organization, and we were really very happy, and we applaud the federal government’s commitment announced in the budget, said Brian Gallant, CEO of Space Canada.

Gallant said that investment in space is an investment in Canada.

Two-thirds of space sector jobs are STEM jobs. These are good paying solid jobs for Canadians. And on top of that, we have approximately $2.8 billion that is injected into the Canadian economy because of the space sector, he said.

The U.S. formed its National Space Council in 1989, but it was disbanded in 1992 and reestablished in 2017. 

In the 2023 budget (new window), the government announced proposed spending of $1.2 billion over 13 years, that was to begin in 2024-25, to the CSA’s contribution of a lunar utility (new window) vehicle that would assist astronauts on the moon. The as–yet–developed vehicle could help astronauts move cargo from landing sites to habitats, perform science investigations or support them during spacewalks on the surface of the moon.

It also proposed to invest $150 million over five years for the LEAP program.

MDA Space, the company behind Canadarm, was also pleased with the announcement.

Canada has an enviable global competitive advantage in space and the creation of a National Space Council is critical to Canada maintaining that leadership position, CEO Mike Greenley said in an email to CBC News.

Space is now a rapidly growing, highly strategic and competitive domain, and there is a real and urgent need to recognize its importance to the lives of Canadians and to our economy and national security.

The next project for MDA is Canadarm3, which will be part of Lunar Gateway, a international space station that will orbit the moon. It will serve as a sort of jumping-off point for astronauts heading to the moon and eventually beyond.

The Lunar Gateway is a great opportunity for Canada and for MDA Space to not only provide the next generation of Canadarm robotics but to clearly plant our flag as a core national and industry participant in the Artemis era, Greenley said.

Lunar Gateway is set to begin construction no earlier than 2025 (new window), according to NASA.

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