Ivan Baxter

Dr. Baxter uses high-throughput elemental profiling to measure the elemental composition of plant tissues including soybean seeds and corn kernels. These data are used to perform genetics and modeling to understand how the interactions of elements, genes, and the environment determine the elemental composition of plants and allow plants to adapt to different environments. BA: Chemistry (Goucher College); Ph.D.: Molecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry (The Scripps Research Institute); Post-doc: Plant Bioinformatics/Ionomics (Purdue University)

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Research

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).

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.

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.

Recently, the Baxter lab has begun studying gene by environment interactions in algae to the fundamental properties of the system as well as algal biofuels applications. Working with a single celled organism allows us to vary the environment accurately and precisely and observe the organism through multiple generations on a short timescale. If we can understand how these processes work on the single cell level, we hope to be able to produce algae strains that can grow with fewer nutrients and produce more oil for the emerging biofuels market.

Technologies available for license: