This summer, I got a grant from the Kolenkow-Reitz fund to study grass mutations at the Plant Gene Expression Center in Berkeley. A Carleton alumnus, David Ignat ’63, set it up to allow Carleton science majors to have research experiences at other institutions.
The Plant Gene Expression Center, or PGEC, is a laboratory facility that is collaboratively run by the USDA and UC Berkeley. It’s a big horseshoe-shaped building, designed in the 1930’s, when laboratories were supposed to be imposing, three-story blocks of cement. I’ll admit I was intimidated the first time I walked up those stairs. Each of the organizations that runs it gets a wing of the horseshoe. I worked in the UC Berkeley side.
I worked in the lab headed by Dr. Sarah Hake, whose research interests focus on maize developmental mutations, especially the family of Knox genes. These genes regulate cell determinacy, so when they don’t work right, cells divide out of control and the corn gets knobs on its leaves. My research project wasn’t on maize, but something related. Brachypodium distachyon, also known as purple false brome, is an unassuming little grass that grows wild in Europe and Asia. It’s emerging as a new model organism for the grasses because it is so small and easy to care for and because it’s only diploid. Many grains have multiple sets of chromosomes (wheat has six!), which makes studying their genetics extremely complicated. We might be able to apply what we learn in Brachypodium to corn.
Brachypodium (lovingly known as “brachy” in the lab) is only just under development as a model organism, so there are a lot of things we don’t know about it yet. That was my job this summer – to work out ways to genetically manipulate the brachy. I worked with an upper-level graduate student, Devin O’Connor, to figure out an inducible gene expression system in the plants. In theory, the plants we were working with should express a gene that stains the leaves blue only in the presence of a rat hormone, and not in its absence. My days involved a lot of painting rat hormone on brachy leaves, harvesting them with dissecting scissors and a pair of tweezers (they are itty bitty little plants), and soaking them in a potion containing detergent, salts, and X-Gluc, that brings out the blue color kind of like developing film.
When I wasn’t tweezering tiny plants, I got to check out the work of other people in the lab, go to seminars, cross corn, and harvest seeds for next year. The highlight of the summer was the Society for Plant Developmental Biology conference in San Francisco, where plant biologists from all over the world came to give presentations about their work.
I went home in September convinced that to be a plant biologist is the coolest job on earth. I get to mess around with green, growing things all day, and I just might discover something that helps protect our global food supply. Thank you, Kolenkow-Reitz fund, and all the Carleton summer research fellowships, for making this experience possible.