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The Baxter Lab:
The Ionomics of Crop
Plants |
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Understanding how plants regulate element composition of tissues is critical for agriculture, the environment, and
human health. Sustainably meeting the increasing food and biofuel demands of the planet will require growing crops with
fewer inputs such as the primary macronutrients phosphorus (P) and
potassium (K). P in fertilizer
is non-renewable, too expensive for subsistence farmers, and inefficiently utilized by crops, leading to runoff and severe
downstream ecological consequences. Plants comprise the major portion of the human diet, and improving their elemental
nutrient content can greatly affect human health. However, efforts directed at a single element can have unforeseen
deleterious effects. For example, limiting iron (Fe) or P can lead to increased accumulation of the toxic elements
cadmium (Cd) and arsenic (As). |
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The Baxter lab is interested in understanding how plants regulate the mobilization, uptake, translocation, and storage
of elements in different environments. We are focusing our efforts on the seeds of corn
and soybeans, the two most commonly grown crops in the United States. The
seeds are important not only as the component of the plant that gets used for food, but also as a summary tissue of many
physiological processes that are important for plant growth. We also study model systems to understand basic processes
and apply this knowledge to the crop plants. |
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The focus of our attempts to study this question is ionomics. We
analyze the elemental content of 500-1000 samples per week using ICP-MS.
We use this high throughput to study structured genetic populations grown in different environments. When we combine this
data with cutting-edge statistical and bioinformatics methodologies, we are able to identify genes and Gene X
Environment interactions which are important for elemental accumulation in plants. |
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