Plant Development Scrutinized in New Lab

With the aid of a £82 million grant from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, in the United Kingdom, about 120 researchers and experts will soon begin to analyze all stages of plant development in the newly-inaugurated Sainsbury Laboratory.

The main goal of the new facility is to understand how plants develop from fertilization all the way to adulthood. This might help experts develops more efficient methods of boosting both food and fuel production from renewable sources.

While the way plants develop has been studied extensively for centuries, investigators still don't know many things about certain stages of the process. Furthermore, there are plant species that present deviations from the general, established rules.

Professor Elliot Meyerowitz is the inaugural director of the Lab. He believes that this line of work is both vital and fascinating, as well as an extremely important intellectual challenge, that needs to be addressed with scientific rigor.

“The answers will not only enhance our fundamental understanding of life, they will also have important application to a critical problem that faces the world today – how to feed and fuel a growing population with limited resources of land, water and energy,” the expert explains.

One of the most interesting aspects about plants is the fact that their cells can actually communicate with each other, via some very small molecules that can travel from one section of the organism to another. Very little is known about this mechanism.

The basic machinery plants use for processing DNA information, as well as the basis of cellular behavior are better understood, but there are still many black holes in the datasets, experts explain.

“Our work aims to understand how plants ‘read-in’ their environment and ‘read-out’ this information as particular patterns of growth and development,” the Lab director adds. His associate director is professor Ottoline Leyser.

The two experts say that scientists working at the Lab will use computational modeling alongside mathematical and engineering-based approaches to get to the bottom of remaining mysteries.

“It is this complex web of interaction that makes living organisms more than the sum of their parts. Even a small plant can have 10 million cells communicating in a whole variety of different modalities, chemical and physical,” Meyerowitz adds.

“There may be 50 different types of plant cells, and each cell might have 30,000 different proteins that might associate and dissociate at millisecond scales, or even less,” he concludes.