Why study plants?

Let us count the ways 🌱🧪💚

Today I want to follow on my last post about the “ends” of scientific research by doing a deep dive on the many goals that plant biologists work towards. Please let me know what I may have missed in the comments!

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One of the high points of my career remains a talk I gave almost 20 years ago.

It was at a Gordon Conference on Mechanotransduction. This topic in any system would have been enough to get me there, but this conference was special in that it featured research using bacterial, plant, and animal model systems. I was a postdoctoral fellow, working on the plant homologs of a family of ion channels that had been discovered in bacteria. Furthermore, I was transitioning into plant work after doing my PhD on yeast at a medical school, so I was familiar with and interested in mechanotransduction research in animal systems.

Many of my scientific heroes were at this meeting, including Roger Hangarter (founder of the super Plants in Motion website), Marty Chalfie (Nobel prize winner for developing GFP for use in biological research), and Ching Kung. It was in Dr. Kung’s University of Wisconsin lab that the channels I studied were first discovered. I’ll never forget the excitement of the audience as I talked about my work, and the kindness of their questions and comments after my talk. I was walking on air by the time we had the usual “business meeting” on the last day of the conference, feeling like I’d found my little corner of the scientific world.

The business meeting ended up being dedicated to the future of the conference, which was apparently in jeopardy as attendance was lower and lower every time the conference was offered. As we discussed the problem, it became clear that most of the animal biologists thought the issue was simple: the presence of plant biologists at the meeting. Most of the plant research represented at the meeting was on gravity perception and response— something plants do admirably well. But, because much of this investigation was done at the level of plant physiology rather than at the level of biomolecules, it was considered less sophisticated and not worth the time or attention of animal biologists. 🤯

I was feeling pretty protected from the conversation as my work was molecular, and those molecules were clearly appreciated by animal biologists. But my mood changed fast as a distinguished biologist stood up to earnestly ask,

“What have we EVER learned from plants?”.¹

At the time I chalked this ignorant question up to the personality of a particularly tone-deaf scientist of a certain generation. I now realize that many scientists, non-scientists, and funding officers do not know the long list of answers to this question.

It’s as if plants are alive

Every plant biologist has a story (usually multiple stories) of attempting to educate an animal biologist who does not know that plants have microtubules or cells or DNA. I once listened to a radio show about Darwin and his fascination with plants. My soul almost left my body when I heard the guest explain that Darwin would visit the plants in his greenhouse daily and “talk to them as if they were alive.”²

Plant biology research and education both suffer from what has been called “zoocentrism”, “plant blindness”³, or “plant awareness disparity.” Why so many people fail to see the importance of plant biology, and why plant biology in particular seems to suffer from imposter syndrome, are interesting questions without easy answers.

So here are as many reasons as I can think of why we study plants. I’d love to hear your thoughts and anything I missed in the comments.

I. The obvious

Almost everything we eat is derived from plants, either directly or indirectly (an exception?). Understanding how plants develop and grow is needed in order to produce the best and most nutritious crops in less-than ideal soils, with reduced dependence on fertilizer and pesticides. The population of the world is expanding, and the climate is changing. Economic and political issues notwithstanding, the science of agriculture could help save millions of lives. (It already did during the Green Revolution!)

According to an interview with a past president of the American Society of Plant Biologists,

“. . . plant scientists mutually agree that our ultimate goal is to develop ways to change crops to improve their yield and nutrition in a sustainable way.”

In 2013, a group of researchers met at a “Plant Science Research Summit” to discuss the future of plant science research. Their summary is solely focused on agriculture.⁴

To be clear, I’m not disputing the importance of agricultural research (not here, at least). It’s just that there are so many other motivations for plant research. I think we do ourselves and our field a major disservice to limit ourselves to “feeding the world”.

II.  Plant-based products

Plants provide the starting materials for clothing, paper, furniture, and fuel⁵. If you like wearing jeans while writing in your journal and sitting at a table at the coffee shop you just drove to in your gas-powered car, you need to thank plants and plant research.

III. Plant Research IS Biomedical Research

One of my favorite soapboxes is addressing the long-standing but totally artificial divide between “biomedical research” and “plant biology research.”

1. Undernutrition and malnutrition are estimated to cause 45% of all child deaths. Growing up hungry magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria, and takes an unquantified toll on productivity, mental health and the inability to make good choices⁶.

2. Where do you think new medicines come from? I promise you that none were invented by mice. At least 40% of Western drugs come from plant-derived compounds.

3. Plants serve as excellent model systems for the study of disease. I don’t simply mean that you can defend their use, like you could put it in your grant proposal (though you sometimes can). I mean that many first discoveries that are relevant to medicine were made in plants. You know—basic stuff like cells, nuclei, genes (yes, plants have all of these and they were first discovered in plants). More specific discoveries like innate immunity and RNAi also came from plant research. For a lovely list of ways in which research on the model flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has contributed to discoveries in human health, see this paper.

IV. Plants might help combat climate change.

Several consortiums (at the Salk and UC Berkeley; there are likely many more) are aimed at engineering plants to sequester carbon to help address the climate emergency. Of course, all plants do this as part of photosynthesis, fixing CO2 into complex molecules like cellulose. But once the plant dies, that carbon is returned to the atmosphere. Current research aims at figuring out ways for carbon to be stored in very stable molecules that can’t be degraded quickly.

IV. Plants have solved universal biological problems in inventive and unique ways.

The differences between plants and animal systems can be as valuable as their similarities. The more examples we have for comparison, evolutionary understanding, AND for application to other systems, the better. One of my favorite examples of technical applications is the exploitation of the plant-derived phytochrome-PIF interaction to engineer photoreversibility to optogenetics in animal cells.

Simply put, the value of a model system cannot be reduced to the ways in which it resembles humans.

V. Because scientific investigation is part of the human endeavor

Finally, an educated populace that asks (and answers) fundamental questions about the workings of the universe through science and art is the mark of a civilized society. Take that, NSF Broader Impacts!⁷ In my view, expanding our knowledge of the world is not a luxury but an imperative, a requirement of the human condition. Plants are part of the natural world, and just because their beauty and complexity is not always obvious to a human is no reason to leave them out.

Conclusion

I can’t say it better than Joe Chappell did in a discussion of the NSF Plant Science Research Summit⁸

“We cannot know how useful any knowledge will be to the next person, but I hope we can agree that knowledge empowers each and every one of us in a myriad of ways. And some of this empowerment will translate into practical utility for society in today’s world, some will have future benefit, and some will rest in the book of mankind to stimulate, support and encourage an unassuming mind in some future scientific pursuit.”

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Discussion Section

• Why do so many people fail to see the importance of plant biology?

• Why does plant biology sometimes suffer from imposter syndrome? (I mean, besides our lower funding levels, the difficulty in placing our manuscripts in general-interest journals, and the ignorance of other biologists about the value of our work??)

• Did I miss a reason to do plant biology research? Please add in the comments.

1. No, I’m not kidding. Emphasis his.

2. Plants are alive.

3. This is an ableist framing; hence the new term.

4. I attended a related summit in 2019 and the discussion was, thanks to a really diverse group of contributors, much broader.

5. Including caffeine!

6. Cassidy et al., 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8; Black et al, 2013 Lancet. Aug 3;382.

7. I did write this in a Broader Impacts section, but only once.

8. His original comment is now lost to the internet.