Q: What’s ahead for the future of plant science using APPL?
A: We’ve done a lot of work with poplar, mosses, and the model Arabidopsis plant, and have gained insights into each of those systems and their microbial associations that confer desired traits. Now we can take what we know about these plant species and their unique relationships with microbes and apply it in other plant systems. The results we’re getting aren’t just useful for our plants of interest, they can be useful for food crops, crops for energy and new materials, or even biomedical feedstocks.
The APPL team continues to expand capabilities. We have computational scientists developing statistical modeling and AI methods to quickly crunch APPL’s big data and extract biologically meaningful traits for genomic analysis. That’s automation of a different kind that can speed our research.
I’m also excited that APPL is adding an underground imaging station this year that will let us analyze root systems. I’m interested in molecular genetic pathways that mediate how plants grow and defend against both biotic stress such as pathogens and insects, and abiotic stress like extreme weather events. When you image belowground, you see the root-to-shoot ratio in plants that indicates whether the plant is sending resources to its root system for processes like root elongation, or whether they’re sending resources aboveground for more photosynthesis and growth or to defend against abiotic stress. More data about what’s happening belowground opens up a means to link the molecular systems we’re looking at to traits across the entire plant.
APPL to me is a scientific lever. It takes the things that were hard to do by hand in the laboratory and speeding up those processes, letting us examine alternate levels of variation, whether it’s between species or within species, and then integrating those results and findings. We can take what we’ve learned in our genome-wide association studies, for instance, about how specific plant genes are associated with different traits and efficiently test those findings in a variety of plant species. Because APPL is automated and uses AI-assisted analysis, we can blow the doors open for new knowledge and plant cultivation.
Q: What advice do you have for other users interested in conducting APPL experiments?
A: You need to have a clear hypothesis on what plant traits you think are going to be influenced in your experiment, and how APPL will measure those traits. Otherwise, you’ll be inundated with all the data APPL can give you. It’s very important to engage with the APPL team and explain what you’re trying to get out of the experiment. They can then point you in the right direction, including interacting with an ORNL plant or microbial expert. Having a well-articulated, defined and vetted hypothesis and experiment will be useful for everyone, including for other users, as more plant scientists engage with APPL.
Q: What’s the ultimate impact of APPL for plant science?
A: The ultimate impact of APPL is using automation to gain a lot more information across the duration of an experiment with less effort. That’s the future of AI and automation in general, and here we’re using it to design better scientific experiments and to create improved plant materials. We expect to continue getting better and better analytical outputs in APPL. The result will be groundbreaking for plant biologists who will be able to see changes and traits they didn’t even know to look for, or especially when to look for those traits. APPL elevates those important things that are happening as plants grow that we may not have thought about in the past and can change the way we conduct our science.
Researchers interested in accessing the APPL facility can check out the APPL website, and make an inquiry using this short form.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. —Stephanie Seay
This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Dave Weston: Fast-tracking plant resilience research in the APPL lab" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news
