Kia Pākiki - E09: Plants, concrete, and insects

I'm here with Adrian and Samarth.

Samarth is a postdoctoral fellow at Canterbury University's School of Biological Sciences.

He's a plant molecular biologist working to develop solutions for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation, and in 2024, he received the Illumina Emerging Researcher Award for his exceptional use of molecular biology tools.

Samarth, you're looking into how plants sense, integrate, and remember environmental cues.

Is that right?

Yes.

It's been long that we all have believed that plants are quite passive organisms, and they are quite unaware.

But through my research, we are trying to show that how much they can perceive environmental signals.

Uh, and particularly, I'm looking at how they can hear different sound vibrations, how they're able to sense those vibrations from the environment and translate those physical signals into biomolecular signatures and convert that into a mul- biological processes and how they respond differently.

Moreover, I'm looking at how plants or trees can detect summer solstice and initiate their reproductive or developmental transitions, which is interesting seeing that such a small change in a day length could initiate something really important for those trees.

And I'm also looking at how plants can remember flooding signals and how they're able to remember those signals in terms of whether they can produce specific metabolites that can help them overcome the flooding stress.

Yeah.

So plants do feel stress as people do.

Yeah.

But it seems like they might be better than people at dealing with it.

Is that right?

[laughs] Absolutely.

[laughs] Since they don't have to, like, go away anywhere, they have to a- almost develop some sort of strategy to be able to cope up with it.

So they have multiple layer of mechanisms underneath them in ways that they could remember them.

So whenever there's a specific stress coming in or there's stress applied in form of it could be man-made or it could be natural, uh, they would remember certain type of transcription factors, certain genes that they induce and that provide sort of, say, resilience, uh, against those stresses in the plants.

So what does memory mean in this sense for you?

So memory is essentially, it's-- I think it's, it's a very much like a anthropomorphic term over here.

So they do remember in case if there is a s- stress applied for a very short term.

So they would perceive it that, "Okay, I am in this condition.

I now need to activate this gene or this protein to help me counteract the stress."