Outreach and Education

We are often invited and always excited to give presentations about our research to the general public. We have had the opportunity to meet with legislators, children and seniors. We think it is critical to share how our findings can be used to improve our local communities, the state, the country and ultimately all of humanity.

Any upcoming talk will be listed in our News Feed and posted online if the recording is available.

Interdisciplinary training at the interface of plant biology and engineering.

Over the last decade, plant biologists have developed resources to study the function of genes in species like Arabidopsis, Zea mays (corn), Oryza sativa (rice), Glycine max (soybean), among others. These are publicly available collections containing thousands of mutants and, on one hand, these resources offer an opportunity to make new discoveries and assign specific functions to novel genes. On the other hand, screening all these resources requires a significant amount of time and effort just for testing one collection in a particular condition (e.g., nutrient deficiency).

High-throughput plant phenotyping is an emerging and fast-moving field capable of performing automated, consistent measurements of plant growth and development. However, designing and building high-throughput devices with high sensitivity and reliability requires not only a clear understanding of biological systems but also engineering proficiency. Currently, plant biologists are not trained in engineering, nor are engineers trained in plant biology.

We have started an interdisciplinary program, in collaboration with Dr. Heather Hunt (MU Bioengineering), where teams of students from engineering and plant sciences work together to design, build and test automatic platforms for high-throughput phenotyping of plants. Furthermore, during the entire academic year (2015-2016) an MU journalist followed the team and conducted interviews at regular intervals to document how members from different fields exchange ideas to solve problems at different stages of the project.

Our first cohort of interdisciplinary students graduated in Spring 2016 after successfully assembling S.P.I.P. [Small Plant Imaging Platform v0.9]. The entire process was documented by Michael Sojka (MU Journalism) and organized in 8 episodes that describe the process from the start of the project to the presentation of S.P.I.P. at the Life Sciences Week in 2016.