See-Through Soil Could Improve Crops

post from Physics Buzz on 21 September 2012 02:17:32 PM. © Physics Buzz

Newly developed transparent soil could help shed light on the secret world of plant roots. The new material, developed by biologists, chemists and physicists, could improve crops and identify new ways of preventing outbreaks of food poisoning.

Lettuce plant growing in transparent soil. Image credit: Lionel Dupuy, Ken Loades, and Helen Downie, http://bit.ly/LDFc85
Plants absorb water and minerals with root systems that can encompass a volume larger than the above-ground parts of plants. Scientists would love to learn more about roots, but much about them remains hidden underground.

"There are so many things to discover in soil, and we don't know yet what they are," said theoretical biologist Lionel Dupuy at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, Scotland.

Now, after two years of trial and error involving painstaking tinkering with the acidity, grain size and nutrient content of a variety of artificial soil-like materials, watered in a customized liquid solution, Dupuy and his colleagues managed to develop a transparent soil in which they could grow plants. The material allows 3-D imaging of the rhizosphere -- the realm of soil involving plant roots and the organisms associated with them.

The soil is made of 350-to-1,600-micron-wide pellets of a synthetic material known as Nafion. This compound often finds use in power-generating fuel cells because of how it can help control the flow of current-carrying ions. Past research revealed that the material had another talent: films of bacteria could grow on Nafion membranes. Also, the scientists could modify the Nafion grains to bind to ions dissolved in the surrounding liquid solution, mimicking natural soil chemistry.

This artificial soil is not especially transparent on its own. However, when saturated with a specially designed water-based solution, the way the soil and the solution each bend or "refract" light renders the combination transparent. A similar effect can be seen if you place one clear glass jar in another clear glass jar and fill the smaller jar and the space between jars with paint thinner ? the smaller jar will seem to disappear.

Although this material does not perfectly mimic real soil, its physical and chemical qualities are close.

"This is huge progress," said plant biologist Laurent Laplaze at the French Institute of Research for Development in Montpellier, who did not take part in this study. "This is a completely new way to look at roots in a more realistic setup than usually used. It is a major technical breakthrough that opens new avenues for plant physiology, plant breeding and the study of plant-microbe interactions."

Dupuy and his colleagues used transparent soil to analyze how potentially lethal E. coli bacteria interacted with lettuce roots. Although E. coli is normally a beneficial microbe in our guts that fights bad bacteria and can even help produce necessary vitamins, dangerous strains can cause severe food poisoning. The researchers used a genetically modified version of E. coli that carried a green fluorescent protein from jellyfish and watched how it behaved with lettuce. They saw the bacterium form micro-colonies in the root zone that likely helps them survive outside of guts.

"If we understand better the contamination route, then we can develop strategies to limit the transfer of E. coli to the food chain," Dupuy said. "We don't really understand how E. coli enters the food chain, particularly for fresh produce."

Transparent soils could be used to study the spread and transmission of other soil-borne infections.

"For example, nematode worms are responsible for the transmission of viruses to crops, and transparent soils could be used to study their feeding habits," Dupuy said.

Transparent soils could also help analyze the roots of a range of plant varieties, which would help to breed crops with more efficient root systems so that agriculture can use less water and fertilizers.
"Root traits have been little used in breeding programs because basically it was very difficult to conduct high-throughput analysis of root architecture in soil conditions," Laplaze said. "The transparent soil approach now opens new avenues for this."

For instance, scientists could genetically modify plants so that key growth hormones and other compounds are tagged with fluorescent proteins. This would help researchers track how these molecules circulate in live plants and see how roots behave, which could shed light on why some plants do better than others under the same growing conditions.

"If we want to make crops and agriculture more efficient, we need to gather information at the molecular level so that we can breed more efficiently for advantageous root traits," Dupuy said.

Future research will endeavor to find a way to bring down costs on transparent soil, as Nafion is quite expensive, Dupuy added. For instance, a transparent soil based on the Teflon family of materials might be possible, he explained.

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 11 in the journal PLoS ONE.

-Charles Q. Choi, Inside Science News Service Contributor

Charles Q. Choi is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets.

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Saving the World: Established 1997

post from Planetary Society Blog on 21 September 2012 02:00:56 PM. © Planetary Society Blog

The Planetary Society Shoemaker NEO grants celebrate their 15th anniversary of helping to find and track near Earth asteroids. Here's a quick review of the program, and updates on our four multiple-grant winners.

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Understanding evolution through bacteria's
innovation

post from Top stories on 21 September 2012 11:43:16 AM. © Top stories

Several years ago researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) reported discovering a novel, evolutionary trait in a long-studied population of Escherichia coli, a rod-shaped bacterium commonly found in the lower intestine of mammals. The E. coli added a helping of citrate to its traditional diet of glucose, even though other E. coli can't consume citrate in the presence of oxygen.

Subject:

Evolution

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The OMB Didn't See This Coming

post from Planetary Society Blog on 21 September 2012 10:58:56 AM. © Planetary Society Blog

In ten days, our members and supporters sent over 17,000 emails to staff members who create and influence NASA's planetary science budget. The public support is there. We're making difference but not letting up.

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l

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Double, The Latest Telepresence Robot, May Just
Beat Out Its Competitors

post from Singularity Hub on 21 September 2012 10:55:14 AM. © Singularity Hub

Look out, here comes another iPad on wheels. To feed our evidently voracious need to be in two places at [...]

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t-beat-out-its-competitors/

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TED: Ed Gavagan: A story about knots and surgeons
- Ed Gavagan (2012)

post from TEDTalks (video) on 21 September 2012 10:15:09 AM. © TEDTalks (video)

One day, Ed Gavagan was sitting on the subway, watching two young med students practicing their knots. And a powerful memory washed over him -- of one shocking moment that changed his life forever. An unforgettable story of crime, skill and gratitude.

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bout_knots_and_surgeons.html

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What Is Companys Most Important Job

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 21 September 2012 10:00:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

This post inspired by a comment from John at HyTek Manufacturing in the Chicago suburbs who commented on our post The Most Important Tool.What is the most important job in a company? In any organization?What is absolutely the one thing that truly determines organizational success?(Ford says

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Do You Have Range Anxiety

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 21 September 2012 10:00:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

At what point do you generally fill up? I tend to pull into the gas station right around the empty mark, but before it goes into the red. How about you?View the Original Article on Autoholics

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Wozniak hungry for AI era

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he's hungry to know what the world will look like when the next frontier of Artificial Intelligence is crossed.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says artificial intelligence is the next technological frontier.

On the day the iPhone 5 was released in Australia, with some hiccups, Mr Wozniak told business leaders in Brisbane that AI was the next logical step.

Subject:

Artificial Intelligence

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Exercise protects against present and future
emotional stress

Moderate exercise may help people cope with anxiety and stress for an extended period of time post-workout, according to a study by kinesiology researchers in the University of Maryland School of Public Health published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.