- [Speaker 1] So the Center itself is a group of faculty and I'm part of that. And our mission is really to improve plant health by focusing on roots in particular and root research and science.
- [Speaker 2] Currently we have over 850 million people around the world who are suffering from food insecurity. And as we gain another additional 2.3 billion people moving over the next 30 years, most of this growth is going to occur in regions that are already food insecure. And we're going to have to increase our food production by an estimated 50% to meet this increased demand from a growing population. So really the overall goal of this center is to address these issues of food insecurity in developing areas as well as to help agriculture. And the focus is really ultimately on root systems of major crop species.
- [Speaker 3] Roots are really hard to study. They're hidden, they're underground, and it's really hard to actually measure what matters to plants. But they're really important, because they're actually grabbing the resources, the water, the nutrients that are really essential for plant growth. And so this is a really sticky problem. It's an interdisciplinary problem. And so what we're trying to do is by bringing people from engineering and plant science and biological sciences and bringing all these scientists together, we're trying to create new methods and new paradigms to study that research at PSU.
- [Speaker 4] So in my work, I explore the natural diversity of maize landraces. These are corn varieties which are still grown and curated by indigenous communities around the world. So corn was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in southwestern Mexico in a relatively restricted area. Very quickly, it diversified and it expanded out to this area as the efforts of the first farmers took corn and allowed it to adapt to many, many different environments, both into the highlands, up to the mountains of central Mexico, south into South America, up again into the mountains of the Andes and obviously up into North America, as far as Canada. Today corn is a global crop and it grows really across the world. And it's proved itself to be very, very adaptable. Understanding how this is possible and what corn has done in the past to adapt to new climatic challenges clearly can provide us lots of valuable lessons as we go forward and strive to continue to make this a crop that we can use in the future. So for any plant root system, the plant can invest either in the roots or in the leaves. Different plants will do this differently. With inside the root, the root effectively is functioning as a pipe, collecting the plant to the soil. And we can see differences in the internal plumbing of the root system. This gives differences in the way which water is taken up and used. In the field, we look to explore the diversity of such varieties, both in the way they look and they perform, directly looking at their root systems. But nowadays also looking at their genomes. By analyzing the DNA of these varieties, we can start to learn both how and why these plants are different and special.
- [Speaker 5] Plants are so important, especially as a food source for all of humanity, as we know. Food security is a big issue. And that basically means that not everybody has access to food or has access to food that's affordable. And some of the issues with growing plants is making sure the plants are healthy, that they grow fast, that farmers can grow them at a good price and that they're available for everyone. So I work really on trying to understand what little microbes, what bacteria, what fungi in particular, what viruses infect plants, make them sick and kill them. And I run experiments both in the field and also in the greenhouse and in the lab on understanding this question: Can we figure out early rapid diagnosis of diseases? Just like in humans, we want to know early on so we can treat something before it gets out of hand. Same thing with potatoes, with grapes, with all these different crops. We want to detect it early. One way that we do that is by using the DNA of the microbes to say are the microbes there and to create assays for detection.
- [Speaker 6] Our research in this lab, my research specifically, is focusing and trying to identify genetic variation for the root system in major crop species like maize or common bean. And just as there's genetic variation for all different traits in many different species, there's also genetic variation for the efficiency of root systems in acquire- in accessing and acquiring and taking up important resources for them to produce optimal yields. A lot of what my work involves is we'll grow a large variety of, say, maize, essentially trying to, in our field environments and greenhouse environments, replicate these stressful conditions that many crops are experiencing around the world in terms of drought or nutrient stress, and then excavate the root system and look at specific root traits, whether that be the architecture or placement of those roots within the soil profile or the anatomy of those roots, which can affect things like the acquisition and uptake of resources, or the metabolic efficiency of soil exploration, and characterize these different traits within the root system under stressful environments and see how these different traits relate to performance of important crop species under these stressful circumstances that we're simulating in our greenhouse or field trials. One tool that we use here at Penn State University is termed laser ablation tomography. This is a novel technology that's been developed here at Penn State university. And what we're able to do is it allows us as a research group to look at the anatomy or the different arrangement of cells within roots and characterize genetic variation for that anatomy and how that anatomy relates to performance in the field. And we can do this in a very high-throughput way, which allows us to screen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of samples a day, which really then was previously a bottleneck to people within the breeding community and identifying genetic variation for anatomical traits.
- [Speaker 7] I come from a traditional evolutionary ecology background. I study how plants and microbes and climate interacts to determine how plants grow and what they do. And one of the reasons I came to PSU and into the Plant Science department is because I want to apply that fundamental research processes and questions to solving agricultural problems. And so in particular, I study legume-rhizobia interactions. And so these alfalfa behind me are an example of these legumes and rhizobia. And they're really special, because it's a plant-microbe interaction that actually fertilizes the plant. In this particular trial, these plants have been growing here for five full years. They have been putting out roots, they've been forming nodules and they've been enriching the soil for the rhizobia that actually fix nitrogen for them. And this happens over and over and over. And we know almost nothing about what's actually happening in the soil here. And I want to figure it out. I want to figure out if the 20 different varieties of alfalfa that are creating this alfalfa trial are actually selecting differently on the strains that are associating with them. And if this is actually an evolutionary mechanism that we can leverage to breed for alfalfa plants that are able to get better nitrogen out of their rhizobial partners. And we've actually developed new methods in the last four or five years where we can actually test this in the field and we can see if this is a new trait that we should be breeding for in agricultural systems. I'd really love if we could take these evolutionary principles that we've been studying for decades and apply them to solve our fundamental agricultural and plant health production problems of the future in ways that create sustainable agroecosystems that require less inputs and less resources to solve some of our problems.
- [Speaker 1] I'm not kidding when I say I wake up and I'm real excited to go to work, because I'm gonna be meeting with all these amazing experts and together we're gonna try to solve these problems in food security. And I'm not gonna do it alone. And that's why I'm part of this Center for Root and Rhizosphere Biology. There are multiple faculty who have different expertise. I'm one piece of that puzzle, but it's really wonderful to work with people who together, we can try to solve these questions.
- [Speaker 2] It's really fulfilling to see that there's actual impact to this work. And it's actually going to be improving the lives and food security of people around the world.
