• Question: Do you sometimes feel like there's nothing more to know about plants.

    Asked by to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Good question! But the short answer is no, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like there’s nothing more to know as every time we find out how something works then there’s always another unanswered question that appears! Think of it like zooming in on a microscope, you think you can see everything but then you zoom in a bit and see more detail, then you zoom in a bit more and there’s tonnes more stuff!!

      For example, I work on plant disease. Now we know what causes the diseases and we know a bit about the life cycle of the fungus or bacteria that causes the disease. So now we’re trying to work out exactly how the plant defends itself, and how the bacteria try and escape the defences so it gets very complicated! Especially now we can look at DNA sequences, there’s a huuuuuuuge amount of detail there and genes that none knows what they do yet!

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Never! There is so much to know about plants and so much to try and understand to help the world. Just like new human diseases appear, so do new plant diseases. We are also always having new plant species evolving, and these will always be different to their ancestors.

      At the moment plant research is only done with a few ‘model plants’ – plants that are easy to grow, grow fast and are small and so easy to work with. Even if we understood everything about these plants, there are still hundreds of thousands of plants out there with new features to investigate.

      As technology improves, we can do new and exciting experiments that we could never do before – like using computers to predict how plants will react to different changes. Computational biology is opening up whole new questions (maybe check out their zone too)

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Never! We have not even found all the species of plant in the world, let alone worked out how these plants work and behave in their environment. Even the species we do know we don’t yet fully understand.

      As Izzy says up until now most plant research has been done on only a few plant species which are small and easy to grow. However, more recently research has expanded into other important species. An example is the wheat that I work with. Because people have only really started researching it in the past few years there is still TONNES left to find out about it!

      Another thing is that technology is developing really fast these days, so we are constantly developing new ways to study things in more detail. This means that even something that we thought we knew everything about, when we look at it using the new technology we can see loads more detail that we hadn’t seen before!

    • Photo: Clemence Bonnot

      Clemence Bonnot answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      No never but this is the case with most science. As soon as you answer a question the answer itself raise a new question and to push forward the knowledge of life mechanism…. they will be always things to understand and discover and even the day we will perfectly understand all the process that happens and rule all living plants life and interaction with their environment, we will have more to look at in regard of the relation humans have with plants (for medicine and agriculture, for clothes, for derived object like paper of furniture….)
      Doing science is in fact a never ending process to answer never ending questions…

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