• Question: What type/part of plants do you mainly research.

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

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      The type of plants I am most interested in are crop plants. This is because they are so important for us to produce food! There is quite a lot of talk at the moment about how we can make sure we have ‘food security’, which is how can we produce enough food to feed all the people on the planet! People are particularly worried about this now because the population is growing so fast, and also the climate is changing so in the future we may not be able to grow the same types of crops that we used to.

      The crop plant species I am studying at the moment is wheat. Wheat is one of the most important crop plants as 20% of all calories (energy) eaten worldwide is from wheat!!

      Even more specifically I am studying the waxes on the surface of wheat. All land plants are completely covered in waxes and you can think of them a bit like the skin of the plant. They are very important to stop the plant losing water, stop the plant getting sun burnt, and protect the plant from insects and diseases. I am trying to improve the waxes on the surfaces of the wheat plants so that the plants grow better, give us a higher yield of grain, and we can make more food.

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      I mainly research peas, and other plants from their family – called the ‘legumes’. This includes broad bean, soybean and peanuts. All of these plants form special relationships with a bacteria called rhizobia – the bacteria I work with.

      Rhizobia is a bacteria that lives in the soil. When it finds a legume plant it moves into the roots and lives inside them in little bumps called nodules. Inside these nodules the bacteria stops reproducing, and uses all its energy to convert nitrogen gas into compounds that the plant can use to grow. This is a trade for sugar from the plant, which is uses for energy.
      It’s pretty cool how these two species work together, and are happy doing it, and it even helps them survive better than other species!

      There is a similar partnership formed between many plants and a type of fungus called mycorrhizae (it’s hard to spell…). Lots of people also investigate these fungi as well, and I get to work with them and share ideas.

      In plants that can’t form these partnerships we have to add fertilisers containing nitrogen – this costs lots of money and energy to make, so if we understand the pea relationship we might be able to use it to help farmers in the future – and possibly reduce the price of your vegetables too.

    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      I work on a plant called Arabidopsis, sometimes called Thale cress. It’s a weedy plant but we use it a lot in plant science because it’s very easy to work with. It’s basically the equivalent of animal scientists learning about how things work in mice rather than humans – for example you can breed mice and look at the genetics of how mouse coat colour is inherited but you can’t just tell humans to breed!

      Here’s a picture of Arabidopsis, it’s a very small plant so we can grow a lot of them! Also the really cool thing is that there is a lot of DNA sequence data on it so it’s great for looking right into the DNA code and seeing what’s going on!

    • Photo: Clemence Bonnot

      Clemence Bonnot answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      I am working with algaes called charophytes. These algae are part of the family common ancestor of all the land plants! I am studying them to understand how the algae ancestor of the land plant adapted to a non aquatic environment. The following question will probably be why just this plant and not other algae, why the adaptation to a terrestrial habitat only happened once in plant history!
      I am principally working of the rooting system of the plants. Indeed all land plants have a rooting system which is capital for the absorption of the nutrient in the soil. Without land plant cannot live but algae can because nutrients are in the water all around them. So we think the root system might have been the first thing that the land plants ancestor had to invent when it start to grow on land!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      I have recently been trying to find out which plants to “mainly research”

      I have made a database, to help me funnel down which plants best suit what i’d like to look for!

      I first started with a list of all the plants known to grow in Scotland (about 2000)

      From here, I then found all those which are known to be edible

      And then I looked to find out which of these have a history for being used for food, but which are no longer used

      This process has taken time, but I am now screening 10 plants (which I have to keep quiet for now ;)) to see if they are toxic… and to see what they taste like

      Wish me luck!

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