Discovering the language
of plants

I see plants as exceptional ‘engineers’. They control chemical and physical processes in elegant and unexpected ways and play dominant roles in defining the well-being of people and the planet. Plants also present understudied challenges that can inspire innovations and foster discoveries in engineering and the physical sciences. With CROPPS, I hope to learn from plants and plant scientists, to open new dialogues that will guide exciting developments in both the life sciences and engineering, and to empower future generations of digital biologists who will define sustainable and robust interactions between humans and plant systems.

Plant systems have captured my imagination since my doctoral work in the field of microfluidics. Walking through the Redwood National Forest in California, I looked up and thought: “How can it be? How could this massive organism overcome gravity to move water from the soil to its needles?” The thermodynamics and dynamics seemed impossible. When I set up my lab at Cornell, my first graduate student and I set out to “learn by building.” We created a primitive ‘synthetic tree’ that showed, for the first time, that the thermodynamics and dynamics of water movement in plants, though exotic, are feasible and engineerable. Since that breakthrough, I have sought and cultivated collaborations with plant scientists so that I could develop a tool to learn directly from plants. My lab designed a sensor that let me listen to plants and hear when they are under water stress. That was my first ‘CROPPS’ moment; my first experience of the thrill of communicating with plants!

Hearing from one plant was astonishing, but plants don’t exist as isolated individuals, they are in constant interaction with each other and their surrounding environment. To understand plant ‘engineering’ requires studying not only the complex details of individual plant functions but how they work together within the full complexity of a complete environment. This requires moving research out of the lab and into the world as it is. With CROPPS, I hope to bring engineers and plant scientists together to break down existing knowledge boundaries—between engineering and plant science but also between lab science and field science. Through these collaborations, CROPPS will provide a vibrant community in which researchers can transcend existing boundaries and understand plants not just as mute entities in isolated, controlled environments, but as gregarious, communicative participants in a dynamic interactive ecological system.

Research themes: Plant Systems, Plant Programming

Photo by Dave Burbank

In the Frank lab, we are interested in how plants communicate both locally (between groups of cells) and over long distances (between root and shoot systems). We are developing new approaches to block, deliver, and image mobile signals; to rewire natural/native communication systems to enable new conversations between plants, people, and their environment; and to track existing conversations within plants using high-throughput sequencing and computational approaches. By learning more about the language of plants we hope to eventually participate in this biocommunication. As the co-lead for the Plant Communication (iTOC) group, and an active participant in CROPPS, I am excited to be working in this highly collaborative space where we are exploring new routes to “listen” and “speak” to plants.

Research Theme: Integrative Team for Organismal Communication (iTOC)

For CROPPS, we will work with programmable plants and the Internet of Living Things (IoLT) at the population level to reveal a novel range of tunable phenotypes. When quantified across hundreds to thousands of distinct genetic backgrounds, this will produce a phenotypic landscape with extensive plasticity, expanding the adaptive potential of the population. As a plant breeder, I will then use this information to select plant genotypes that have the most favorable combinations of phenotypes for target environments. This will result in more resilient plants and increased yields. This strategy could be useful for a variety of plant breeding programs, large and small. As a co-lead of the Discovery Engine for Extreme Phenotypes and Field Investigation of Novel Diversity (DEEPFIND) research thrust, I hope to make this vision a reality through interdisciplinary research that ultimately generates extreme, selectable phenotypic variation that can be modeled to help enhance genetic gains in plant breeding programs.

Research Theme: Discovery Engine for Extreme Phenotypes and Field Investigation of Novel Diversity (DEEPFIND) 

My goal with CROPPS is to improve the process of public engagement with science. I want to find ways to help scientists understand public interests and concerns early in the research process, so they can be addressed as research projects develop. This goes hand-in-hand with helping various publics understand what CROPPS is and can do.

Over the last 50 years, it’s become clear that public engagement isn’t just about “outreach” or “science literacy.” For public engagement to work, it must be a truly engaged conversation, where all parties – scientists, consumers, community members, business partners, and any other groups who care – listen to each other. Yes, publics need to understand the scientific process and the results of scientific work. But scientists must understand public interests and concerns, the values that shape responses to research, the ways that different groups understand and assess risk, and the place that science has in the lives of different communities. Just as we hope that scientific research will yield a better world, so we hope that public interests can lead to better science. “Politics” in the broadest sense, the sense of finding ways of addressing multiple interests through informed conversation, is a fundamental part of science.

To foster this kind of public engagement will require discovering what the social, ethical, and public engagement issues are in digital biology and programmable plants and then building capacity for real public engagement. I’ll work with CROPPS participants to understand their visions of what can be accomplished and then engage with various publics to understand their visions of what should be accomplished. Those public visions will feed back into CROPPS discussions, which in turn will shape future public activities in an ongoing process of engagement.

Research themes: Public Engagement

Photo by Dave Burbank

As a computer engineer, I am always excited by complex problems, because complexity often requires computers to find effective solutions! With CROPPS, I seek to use my expertise by imagining hardware-software approaches that enable high-performance plant data collection and computation in the farm and the cloud.

In the last few years, work in my field has shifted away from a decades-long interest in general-purpose computers to developing more specialized programmable hardware optimized for specific domains. Within CROPPS, I believe at least two contexts are ripe for such domain-specific computers. One of these two contexts is systems that can efficiently collect, analyze, and act upon data from sensors distributed through a farm. For example, data from various sensors may suggest that crops could be under water stress, which a cloud-based algorithm may decide to act upon, producing an irrigation schedule that mitigates the problem while minimizing water waste and energy consumption. The other context more intimately involves a plant’s genetic make-up, literally transforming it into a living sensor that can tell us about its condition and that of its surrounding environment through phenotypic expression—a change in leaf translucence or pigmentation, for example. Figuring out exactly how to “program” the plant’s genome to communicate in that way requires significant computational power. These two contexts combined create a true “Internet of Living Things.”

My other role in CROPPS is as Associate Director for Diversity and Inclusion. By emphasizing continuous, inclusive engagement with and mentorship of CROPPS students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty alike, we seek to nurture members from a wide variety of backgrounds and lived experiences, in particular those from historically underrepresented or underserved communities. Ultimately, we aspire to create a diverse new generation of scientists and leaders that will become agents of change during and after their CROPPS tenure.

Research themes: Plant Systems, Public Engagement

I have always been interested in language and the ways it allows us to share ideas, perceptions, and experiences beyond the boundaries of individual reality. As a plant scientist and breeder, I’m excited to join the CROPPS team of biologists, engineers, and computer and information scientists as we seek to create a two-way communication system with plants.

Plants are responsive, living organisms that use complex forms of communication to explore and respond to the world in which they live. Their ‘language’ is mediated by chemical, optical and electrical signaling systems that challenge human understanding. Plants use these systems to exchange information with other members of their community – other plants, insects, and the diverse array of organisms in their microbiomes.

As organisms, plants lie at the base of the world’s food chain and feed all life. They also play a dominant role in defining our climate’s future. Their survival is our survival, and yet, our current interactions and communications with plant systems are primitive. We lack the tools to probe the deep biological processes that mediate how they organize, process, record, and share information; how they respond to environmental stimuli; and how they select from a range of possible responses. We know plants communicate readily with other organisms, but they use a language that is strange and unfamiliar to human beings.

CROPPS researchers will invent new technologies and foster scientific discoveries to develop new communication tools (living nodes on the Internet of Living Things). These tools will allow us to capture, transmit, integrate, and understand plant signals; to make discoveries and predictions; and to send return signals in response. If we can establish a two-way dialogue with living plant systems, we can gain insight into real-time biological processes in ways never before possible. That insight, driven by deep respect for the living world, has profound implications for reshaping human responses to climate change, environmental degradation, and global hunger.

Research themes: Plant Communication

Photo by Robert Barker

My fundamental scientific interest is in heritability and its limits. The DNA we inherit from our parents makes us similar to them, but the environment we live in can modulate our genes to make us different from our parents. How does this happen? The passage of information from one generation to the next is one of the fundamental rules of life, applicable to plants as well as to people. I am excited by what CROPPS will discover about how information flows to, from, and within plant systems.

I am also passionate about providing opportunities for high school and undergraduate students to participate in laboratory research. My start in science began when I was 15 years old, working as a high school student in a University of Arizona lab. I had a simple project–searching for mutants of Arabidopsis with increased sensitivity to U/V light–but by being immersed in a working laboratory I learned much more about genetics and molecular biology. I explored several different experimental systems throughout my high school and undergraduate years – from mammalian toxicology to fish ecology – but I always came back to plant genetics. That early opportunity to work in a research lab quite literally set the trajectory for my professional life. I hope that the various research internships CROPPS will sponsor will likewise inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers to focus on plant sciences.

Research theme: Plant Programming

I work with CROPPS aligns with her interest in understanding gene function to improve crops for sustainable food security. With CROPPS, I will work to develop a two-way interaction with plants that will enable us to understand and to respond to their signals. If we can understand what plants need, when they need it, we can produce healthier plants with improved yields and greater resilience to climate and environmental stresses, and we can do so with fewer, more well-managed resources.

I will be working to develop a high-throughput pipeline for generating different iterations of comprehensible, programmable plants for testing in lab and field. This will also require pushing plant genetic engineering beyond its current limits, enabling it to meet the high demand for this technology, which is essential for plant research of all kinds, in all locations. Collaboration within CROPPS, which includes engineers and computer scientists as well as plant researchers, will foster the development of more efficient plant genetic engineering methods. These new methods will not only support this particular project but will advance innovation and research in agriculture across the world.

Research theme: Plant Programming

With CROPPS, I am excited to use my expertise in computer systems and networking to open a dialogue with plants. The goal is a two-way conversation—to understand the ongoing communications between plants but also to join their conversation. Current engineering and plant science research projects have used external sensors which measure conditions like water or nutrient levels in plants and then transmit a message when the plant is in stress. I am interested in developing a system where the plant itself is a sensor, directly transmitting through a network to computers which serve as the conduit to carry the communications to people, an Internet of Living Things (IoLT). For me, CROPPS is the creation of a synergy between computers, plants, and people, to help grow plants better.

Much of my prior work has involved making networks faster and computers more reliable, often for big companies; my work with CROPPS will allow me to put my expertise to work for plants, farms, and growers. To do this will require figuring out how to instrument a farm (even one without cellular access) in a way that allows high-bandwidth communication that can receive and respond to simultaneous transmissions from numbers of plants. We are currently experimenting with using analog signals (tv antennas) to create robust local networks regardless of cellular availability. We are also engaging with the challenges of developing systems that must function seamlessly and autonomously throughout a growing season in often remote areas.

Developing this new system of communicating with plants and people at scale will have effects far beyond the simple addition of technologies to individual farms. If the farm becomes networked, how does that change what a farm is? Will we have to transform our understanding of what a ‘farmer’ is, broadening it to include technologists and data analysts? I am working with social scientists to ensure the process is transparent and proactive, so that we can plan for and optimize these social transformations and build flexibility into the system. Designing the ‘perfect’ farm network is unrealistic; the farm user needs the ability and independence to make changes. Transparency in planning will also involve ensuring that new technologies, procedures, and knowledge will be freely and broadly accessible. In my role as Associate Director for Innovation and Partnerships, I will foster a level playing field, where the open exchange of ideas can thrive among all stakeholders (including individuals, NGOs, non-profits, and corporations), at all stages of the process (from producers to consumers), and for a diversity of groups.

Research themes: Plant Programming, Public Engagement