• Question: What is the most interesting plant you have worked with? Why?

    Asked by chloedownes to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      The most interesting plant I have worked with is the plant I am working with now – peas. In peas (and related plants like beans) there are hundreds of special bacteria that live inside bumps on the root called nodules. The bacteria inside these nodules are like factories, producing ‘nitrates’ (chemicals needed to make proteins and DNA) in return for food from the plant. The bacteria and plants live and work together to help eachother out. This is called ‘symbiosis’ which literally means ‘living together’. I find it fascinating that these two organisms work and live together to improve eachother’s lives.

      If I could work on any other plant I would probably work with plants with interesting colours and shapes – I love looking around for exciting looking flowers. For example, there is a type of orchid that evolved to look like a bee, so that it can attract bees to pollinate it. If you ever get the chance to go to Kew Gardens or another botanical garden, definitely go – there are some amazing plants there.

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I have only ever worked with 2 types of plants, water cress which is TINY, and wheat. Of the two, wheat is the best.

      I think wheat is really interesting because:
      It is a very important source of food for many people in the world: 20% of all calories eaten worldwide come from wheat
      The wheat I work with has 6 copies of each chromosome! You only have 2. This means it has a massive genome and is very interesting to work with genetically.
      There are hundreds of different varieties of wheat so it is impossible to get bored of working with it – can just switch to a new variety!

      One of the things I would most like to do is go to the Amazon Rainforest to look at the amazing plant life. There are so many weird and wonderful species of plant there that they haven’t all been found yet! I’m saving up money to go hopefully in a few years time!

    • Photo: Clemence Bonnot

      Clemence Bonnot answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I ve worked on 7 different plant species (and 2 fungus) during the last 8 years.
      My favorite one was the strawberry ( you can imagine why) but it wasn’t the most interesting.
      i would say the most interesting for me is Marchantia Polymorpha. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/56406-Marchantia-polymorpha
      This plant is a liverwort and is assume to be very closely relative to the very first plant that have colonized land when no animals were living on it.
      This plant is interesting because it is a pioneer of land conquest, because it is the closest plant to the ancestor of all the other plants you can find on land. consequently it gives us clues about what were looking like the first plant and how much evolution as allowed them to change and become so various. Marchantia is a very small plant. When you look at a giant tree can you imagine that its ancestors were looking like Marchantia? What a long road walked to get there. This plant is still living today and very well adapted to its environment that almost nothing can kills it…. We have a lot to learn from it… from the past of the planet , the mechanism of evolution, to the discovery of new molecule that were never found before in any other plants or animals….

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I am currently weighing up a list of around 1300 plants known to grow in Scotland, I am currently using statistics and research to narrow this down to a top 10 interesting plants to study…

      I’ll let you know that list when I can! I assure you that they will be very very interesting

      In the past I was lucky to work with Thale Cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), This is the “lab-rat” of the plant world. There is more known about this plant than any other! It isn’t really anything special to look at, but it has helped scientists understand many other plants, thus making those interesting too!

    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know if this is THE most interesting but a project I did when we did field work in Portugal was on snap dragons. The flowers are long and narrow and pollinated by bees, however we were investigating the fact that some bees have learnt that they can drill through the base of the flower and drink the nectar without having to properly crawl in and pollinate the flower in order to get it. It turns out that even though bees do this a large amount of the time (how lazy) the plants produce enough flowers and attract enough pollinators to continue flowering at a huge rate despite the bees cheating the system!

      I guess this is more of an interesting bee story than plant story but it just sprung to mind 🙂

      Apart from that I’d say a plant called Nicotiana benthamiana, which is related to tobacco. It’s a plant which you can infiltrate with bacteria and create fluorescent staining on the cells really easily, so it’s a really interesting system to use for this!

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