Plant biologist Dr Grace Fleming dissects the secret life of seeds. In a conversation covering everything from seed vaults to space seed trials, she examines the mechanisms of seed dormancy and how seeds sense and interact with their environment.
Bio:
Dr Grace Fleming is an Assistant Professor in Plant Biology at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Her work examines the physiological underpinning of seed dormancy and responses to varying environmental conditions, with a high priority placed on identifying and validating genetic and physiological factors contributing to seed longevity in the soil seed bank. Her research on the underlying mechanisms of seed death, viability and germination has applications in diverse areas including crop cultivation, weed management, and gene bank storage.
This conversation is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
[00:00:00] I'm Catherine Polcz and this is Plant Kingdom.
[00:00:11] I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the E.R.
[00:00:15] Nation and I've hair respect to their elders past, present and future.
[00:00:20] Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature and environment,
[00:00:25] featuring scientists, artists, researchers and writers.
[00:00:28] We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants in nature.
[00:00:35] Today's conversation is with Dr. Grace Fleming.
[00:00:38] She takes us into the secret life of seeds and we talk everything from seed dormancy to seed bolts and examine how they do exactly what they do.
[00:00:48] I'll now introduce Grace.
[00:00:51] Dr. Grace Fleming is an assistant professor in Plant Biology and Michigan State University in East Lansing.
[00:00:59] She is interested in the physiological underpinning of seed dormancy,
[00:01:03] a totally perplexing and fascinating field.
[00:01:06] Here's our conversation.
[00:01:16] Thank you so much for chatting with me today.
[00:01:20] I'm really excited to talk about seeds and it's been really interesting to prepare for this conversation.
[00:01:26] I think for me and probably for a lot of people, you know, you think you understand what a seed is and what it does
[00:01:31] that you've never really thought about it.
[00:01:32] It's another example of something that we see every day and haven't really stopped to marble at.
[00:01:38] Yeah, it's easy to take seeds for granted so really excited to jump in but I didn't want to start with just some really basic questions about seeds
[00:01:48] and I guess the simplest one is what even is a seed.
[00:01:55] There's a lot of ways you can think about seeds.
[00:02:00] One is just, it's like a a proper guill we call them.
[00:02:05] It's a way to distribute the babies the next generation.
[00:02:11] They can travel they are food for the baby plants inside them but also for all kinds of animals and insects.
[00:02:23] And even sometimes other plants.
[00:02:27] Fun guy for me as a scientist I think about the most as future plants.
[00:02:33] But I've been pushing against that a little bit because I think they also have their own identity as a seed.
[00:02:41] Yeah, interesting. Well, yeah, because they're not yet a plant.
[00:02:46] Right. They're ready. They're potential.
[00:02:51] But at the same time, they are something they're seed.
[00:02:56] Yeah. And our seeds alive.
[00:03:01] I hate this question.
[00:03:07] So there are some seeds that are definitely alive because they start to germinate basically as soon as they're mature.
[00:03:17] There's no pause in the lifespan of the plant, the plant grows.
[00:03:23] It flowers that makes a seed the seed immediately germinates in the next generation.
[00:03:27] It's up and running without any time in between.
[00:03:31] And there's other seeds where they do they have this lifetime of being a seed before they germinate.
[00:03:37] And while it's a seed, it's really hard to tell because one of the big ways we define something as being alive is that it responds to its environment.
[00:03:50] It's able to perceive things and respond to inputs.
[00:03:55] And the most part seeds don't really seem to do that.
[00:03:59] They're hard. They don't change. That's kind of the whole point is that they don't change until all of a sudden they're allowed to change.
[00:04:08] So that lack of change makes it a little hard to say yes, they're alive.
[00:04:12] But if you go to germinate them then it's really easier.
[00:04:16] Yeah. That seed was alive but I don't have a seed anymore. I have a plant now.
[00:04:22] I guess I mean, I wrote that question and asked it to you but it really is just us putting our human values on plants again.
[00:04:30] So I spoke with someone earlier who works on Dinoflagellits and they, I don't know, germinate's not the right word but came alive from their dormit,
[00:04:47] but they're not the right word.
[00:04:51] So I've been working with Dinoflagellits, they have this pause so like tardigrades or the water bears are very charismatic and can drive them.
[00:05:13] And just hang out in this dry seat for a long time and they revive and then for the most part go back to what they were doing.
[00:05:25] But the seeds just, if the transformative experience.
[00:05:31] Yeah, it's not just waking up again. It's something different.
[00:05:34] I did the plants. There's earlier plants that don't have seeds that reproduce by spores that are kind of more ancient, lineages, seeds evolved something like 365 million years ago.
[00:05:49] What did what's the evolution of seeds enable plants to do? Like plants really proliferated after seeds and flowers evolved?
[00:05:59] Yeah, that's a great research area all on its own.
[00:06:05] So I'm not going to do it full justice but I'm going to dress it to some extent.
[00:06:11] What I love about it the thing that draws my attention to seeds is that there is, like we were just talking about, there's this pause between generations.
[00:06:21] So that pause I think is really valuable because it means they can kind of the plants can hide from an adverse environment.
[00:06:31] If the environment has changed and it's not favorable for the plant anymore, the seed might be able to withstand it.
[00:06:40] And then when the conditions go back to being favorable for the plant, the seed can then become the plant.
[00:06:49] So it sounds like very drastic but really what I'm describing is like wintertime.
[00:06:57] Oh yeah. That's actually, yeah, it's such a clear way to think about it.
[00:07:04] Yeah, so that's just one and it's such an important thing for plants because they are tied to a place.
[00:07:12] You could divide things like animals or stuck to their time.
[00:07:17] They can't go into stasis and then come out and be in a different time.
[00:07:22] But they can move around and get from place to place and plants have a limited capacity for movement on their own.
[00:07:29] But seeds are really where it's at in terms of running a new space or waiting out this bad time.
[00:07:38] Yeah, yeah, they can move through time more so than space.
[00:07:44] But then the seeds also let them move through space because they get eaten and carried around and just spread all over the place.
[00:07:54] And that part of seeds is also wildly successful.
[00:07:59] Definitely and that's something will come back to in a second too.
[00:08:05] And this is a big part of I think what you study in your research interests are, but how does the seed monitor its environment or is it actively or perceiving and receiving information when it's a seed?
[00:08:23] So this is I just did a deep dive into this question like a couple of days ago.
[00:08:31] I've been looking over a lot of literature about or it happens to be related to this.
[00:08:36] So there are a lot of ways that the seed perceives its environment and there are some ways that it can interact with its environment more directly.
[00:08:46] And there's just more sensors, more types of sensors than I had dreamed of.
[00:08:52] And it almost feels like an elaborate series of like a trap.
[00:08:57] Like you know if you put a hair across the door jam and then the hair is missing and so you could say, ah ha, someone opened the door.
[00:09:05] And if like that, like the seeds have like that one and then they have another thing where like a piece of paper falls and then if you go further and like the fan has been turned out like all of these different things have to happen in the right order to let germination happen sometimes.
[00:09:21] Yeah for them to be like it is spring right yes no they're very cautious a lot of time I mean there's others that are like what's going on.
[00:09:31] Yeah that's there strategy yeah.
[00:09:35] So one that I found was just it surprised me is that the seed coat is this dry layer that surrounds the seed it's on the outside and the seed coat is material that's made by the mother plants so it's only like 50% genetically related to the seed.
[00:09:57] So that on its own it's like that's a pretty cool situation and then the seed coat is mostly the time completely dead like those cells have done whatever job they had and then the chores to you has this dry seed coat surrounding it that if you add water those cells are not going to do anything they're done.
[00:10:16] But the outer layer of the seed is not dead and can sense pressure between the inside of the seed and where the seed coat is.
[00:10:29] So the degree of pressure that that outer layer feels as like the seed is taking up water and the seed coat maybe is or is not stretching depending on what kind of seed coat it is like that pressure is something.
[00:10:44] That will kick off a germination response or not pressure is a big deal for plants so like a kind of makes sense overall but just thinking about how these all these plants else are able to tell the pressure that it like oh my gosh.
[00:10:59] And is it something that science really understands how the seeds are doing that or is that really like we're trying to understand those pathways and.
[00:11:19] I feel like it is following a path a lot of.
[00:11:25] In crazy science take where we can explain this mechanical.
[00:11:32] Observation and we have the rules to measure it to some extent like just detecting changes in pressure in this.
[00:11:41] It's a little bit of a technical challenge but we can do that but then as far as how it's actually happening is.
[00:11:56] That's a very question to ask so there's some like molecular stories of oh this protein gets squashed or this gene gets turned on somehow but get that level of explanation of like the cellular.
[00:12:10] Mechanics is under development.
[00:12:17] Yeah yeah it's so so interesting and again it's a totally different system to us right we have nerves and know how decisions are made in our bodies and plants.
[00:12:32] It's a whole different system.
[00:12:36] Yeah the change that leads to germination this is the whole seed gets all the individual cells in this you get synced up anyway.
[00:12:49] So that germination can be this synchronized process and it's very rare in a plants life that that like the whole entire plant is in sync because it doesn't need to be the roots are doing their their root thing and the leaves are doing their leaf thing.
[00:13:05] And it doesn't matter.
[00:13:08] Yeah it's kind of like centrally coordinated somehow fascinating.
[00:13:15] There's another cool example of the seed and the environment interacting which I just love which is these seeds I think it's common name is Storksville that's a kind of uranium and they make a very pointed capsule.
[00:13:33] And then the seed has long ons which are just like almost very thin and narrow ribbons that extend off of this seed.
[00:13:44] So it'll have two ons and the ons have a coil to them almost like curly hair.
[00:13:53] It's just again, it's like this mechanical property of this material and in.
[00:14:01] I'm going to get this backwards but doesn't matter there will be in a wet or like a humid environment if the air is damp because rain is coming.
[00:14:11] But ons will be coiled up tightly together and then it dries out and then the uncoil and this repeated coiling and uncoiling act like a screw.
[00:14:21] So this needs to reals itself into the soil, it plants itself.
[00:14:27] And scientists have taken this design and improved on it to make what they call a seed drilling robot.
[00:14:36] But it's not electric like it doesn't have any power source, it's powered by the same idea of the water level changes how tightly coiled.
[00:14:47] And so you can put seeds of whatever type inside this seed drilling robot and then it gets drilled into the soil by itself.
[00:14:57] Like, so cool.
[00:15:01] Amazing.
[00:15:03] Right? And there's like hundreds and millions of examples of solutions like this exactly.
[00:15:11] Yeah, this is like one species of the no butchillion.
[00:15:16] Yeah.
[00:15:17] I don't know how many will just take numbers.
[00:15:20] And I guess we've covered this a little bit when you're talking about dispersal too, I guess what are the kinds of conditions that cause a seed to germinate is it really specific to how that plant lives in.
[00:15:37] Yeah, it's so different species they will have their own things that they want to have happen.
[00:15:46] But in general, it's something that lets the seed know that the seedling is going to emerge into an environment that it can handle.
[00:15:57] So for example, a lot of plants that are annuals.
[00:16:03] So they make seeds and then they die and then those seeds germinate the next year and makes seeds and die like that's all they got is their one year of being a plant.
[00:16:13] The seeds are shed at some point in the summer maybe later in fall and if they germinated right then that plant might not be able to handle the winter.
[00:16:24] So those plants often require a chilling period or there's different means for this cold treatment of the seeds but essentially the seed needs to know it's gone through one winter and then it starts getting warmer and then that's the signal that it's safe.
[00:16:43] And then the annual is able to like go for it or if it's something that grows in a really fire prone area or it's something that is maybe part of the first wave of plants in a successful series where you start out with like a bunch of annuals and then it build up to having some bushes and maybe some trees and then you get a forest.
[00:17:08] And then you get a forest fire or lightning storm and a whole bunch of trees get cleared just from the middle of the forest and all those annuals that started out.
[00:17:18] They still have seeds around and they're getting all of a sudden more light than they ever had before because these tall trees that made the shady forest floor are just gone and so they're like, ah, it's my time.
[00:17:35] Yeah, go go go yeah.
[00:17:37] And the ways again just like the ways that seeds can sense what's in the environment of the ways that seeds detect if the seedling is going to be alright they're so sophisticated they have it's hard to generalize like what it might be but.
[00:17:53] It's usually some combination of temperature and light and water and then maybe a couple extra things.
[00:18:03] Yeah, some of the fire adapted species in Australia for some of them you know it's it's the fire and the heat for some it's even just some one of the chemicals in the smoke after two.
[00:18:16] It's just.
[00:18:18] Yeah, and then two like you can have the chemicals from the smoke and that's good but then you also need to have a rain because otherwise like everything still to dry.
[00:18:32] And there are some species where if the the smoke and then the water or not if they don't happen close enough in time.
[00:18:41] Then the seed will just be like, nah wait I'll try again later.
[00:18:46] Yeah, yeah and they got one shot don't think.
[00:18:50] Right.
[00:18:51] And another big question for you.
[00:18:55] How didn't how did seeds come into your life? How did you come to study seeds?
[00:19:01] Well, it was really a lot of luck.
[00:19:07] And I wouldn't change it for anything.
[00:19:11] I love seeds very very much but I was studying cell wall biology like molecular structure of cell walls from the perspective of engineering them to be easier to break down and turn into biofuels.
[00:19:30] So that was what I worked on for my PhD which is pretty far away from seeds.
[00:19:37] But then when I graduated it happened that the National Laboratory for term-plasm resource preservation and LGRP, which is on the campus of Colorado State University.
[00:19:53] They were hiring for a post-act position and so it just like worked out.
[00:19:59] And once I started working with seeds of like, I am never looking back this is the best.
[00:20:06] Yeah, yeah, that would be lots to keep you busy with your whole career.
[00:20:14] And what is the kind of big picture of your research interests on seeds?
[00:20:23] I've had a chance to say some of these ideas already but I'm really interested in like what seeds do.
[00:20:34] What are seeds as themselves, like not a future plant? What is the seed?
[00:20:42] And so I think a lot about how time affects seeds partly because I did this research at the NLGRP which I think we're going to talk about it a little bit.
[00:20:54] But they're just, they store seeds for a long time and see what happens.
[00:21:01] And I find that very interesting that we can sort of, because they have this pause, we can probe the effects of time.
[00:21:10] It becomes an experimental variable which is not ordinary.
[00:21:16] And then now that I've started my own lab, I'm interested in not just how seeds handle being stored for a long time like in a lab.
[00:21:30] But what happens when they're in more natural conditions like just out in nature? They do just fine a lot of them all on their own.
[00:21:40] And so how does that work? Because those conditions are very, very different from being stored in a super cold freezer and like never being touched or moved or like they're just there.
[00:21:55] And so right now the way I'm getting into it is thinking about seeds taking up water, but they can also become dry again. They can take up water for a certain period of time.
[00:22:12] For some, they can even like just start to germinate. So maybe their seed coat gets a little crack and the tiny little root may be starts to poke out.
[00:22:20] And even then depending on the species, they can be dried back down to like 5% moisture.
[00:22:30] And they're not dead. A year later, 6 month later, 5 years later, they can be rehydrated and turned into a plant.
[00:22:42] And if you're in the soil, there's a lot of water around from time to time. And sometimes it's there's not a lot of water around. So just experiencing changes in the water and their environment.
[00:22:57] I think they must have some very good strategies around that, but they're not very well explored yet. Or I haven't found the answers if they are out there already.
[00:23:08] Are there particular species or kind of model organisms that you work with? I guess in some projects it's quite diverse.
[00:23:21] Yeah, my favorite seed and I came to love it during my postdoc is Philippine. And it was just very, very nice.
[00:23:36] It's quite large as far as seeds go. It has this nice seed coat that easy to remove. They don't usually have dormancy, which is where you try to germinate them and they say, no, you didn't give me like the special blankets I'm not going to germinate.
[00:23:55] But we also work with a rabbit oxus, which is just the model plant. It has infinitesimal lesimals seeds, but we know a lot about its genetics so it can be very useful.
[00:24:08] Yeah, I think a rabbit oxus is so interesting and how model organisms come to be. Do you know how why a rabbit oxus is so well studied or it's just started people started working on it and then those are the basis for future work, how why a rabbit oxus?
[00:24:27] There was a long time when pee, like, pee some sativum. That was a big favorite. You might remember, you know, Gregor Mendel, he did all these experiments with pee, is that really that a good foundation for a bunch of work in pee as a model plant system.
[00:24:49] And this is like more like a legend than true accounting of what happened. It's fun to tell a good story rather than stick to the dry facts.
[00:25:00] So basically, a scientist or maybe a small cohort of scientists decided that pee was insufficient as a model species and basically just decided a rabbit oxus was it.
[00:25:14] It was there, like labs, favorite pet plant. Like I might have said, oh no, it's even soybean. They're like, I think a rabbit oxus is good and there are a bunch of things about a rabbit oxus that are convenient.
[00:25:29] It can take just a month to go from seed to seed. So you plant a seed and a month later you're collecting mature seeds off of the iron plants. Like that is pretty darn fast for plant experiments.
[00:25:42] It's the fruit-life plants. Yeah. Exactly. And it's small growing. So you can put a lot of them in a small space.
[00:25:54] It's pretty tolerant of crummy environmental conditions. It doesn't need a lot of fancy stuff to be happy and it's genome is pretty small. So it was one of the first genomes that was sequenced.
[00:26:10] And that was published in 2000 and part of that is just because there was less material. They had to be sequenced.
[00:26:20] Yeah, so that's the that's the the basis and can you just describe what it looks like.
[00:26:27] So it is in it's a brass case E. So this is the family that has broccoli and cauliflower and
[00:26:39] recipe mustard family in the common name. Yeah.
[00:26:46] Mustard's yep. So it's got what's called a rosette farm. So it makes a whirl of leaves that all life flat against the ground and their green and like moderately poke you around the edges like a
[00:27:08] sandy lion or a prickly lettuce. And then when it's ready to start flowering, it makes an inflorescence which is the tall stalk that sticks straight up from the rosette and the rosette will get to be about like four inches diameter.
[00:27:29] And then the inflorescence will come up and be maybe like six inches tall that can vary a little bit. And it will make tiny teeny teeny tiny voice flowers that continue to open up until it decides like it's done.
[00:27:47] And then the seed pods are silyx. So they're very long and narrow and they get dry and brown kind of like a pea pod except much tiny or.
[00:27:57] And then they're full of these teeny tiny brown seeds they're quite oily. They're bigger than a poppy seed smaller than a sesame seed.
[00:28:09] And as significant project that you've been working on is known as the be all experiments.
[00:28:19] Can you tell me about this and how long this has been the experiments been going on for.
[00:28:27] So we are working with all of those seeds to the bottles that he buried had 20 different species at least in each of them.
[00:28:37] And for each species he put 50 seeds. So one bottle had a thousand seeds and he made 20 bottles.
[00:28:48] These are glass like pint bottles very like a flask almost skinny long neck very small opening.
[00:28:59] And the seeds were mixed with sand and then stuffed in the bottles and then buried on campus here any slanting.
[00:29:10] And then they were buried with the end of the bottle like the neck part of the bottle open.
[00:29:15] So the sand went all the way up to the neck and then there was no covering put over it.
[00:29:21] And they were buried upside down so the next pointing down just here on campus in 1879.
[00:29:30] Wow. So 145 years ago and they were buried by who who who is built.
[00:29:39] He was a plant biologist. He liked seeds a lot. He did a lot of work with seeds. But he also just thought plants were cool. We have a garden that he designed which showcases plants from different classes.
[00:29:56] So I think it's arranged sort of by evolutionary group.
[00:30:01] But he also planted an experimental grove of trees on campus and he communicated with Darwin about corn breeding.
[00:30:10] He was involved in the development of the United States Department of Agriculture.
[00:30:18] And it was a head-eat time for being a plant scientist because he got to advocate for the plants that we were using for agriculture being considered as worthy of scientific study.
[00:30:34] Just as much as anybody else's plants and that had a big impact.
[00:30:38] Without that advocacy and seeing that we could be scientific about planting and fertilizing and roast basing and all this stuff,
[00:30:47] the agronomy wouldn't exist probably. It was a big deal to get it all taken seriously.
[00:30:55] Yeah. And when he buried the bottles, what was he? Was it a seed longevity experiment from the beginning? What was he wanting to know?
[00:31:11] Yeah. It was. It was just we don't really know how long seeds can last when they're in the soil. So let's try it out.
[00:31:22] He was an old man when he started this experiment and at the time, he planned for a bottle to be unearthed every five years.
[00:31:34] So with 20 bottles that would be a 100-year experiment. So even when he started it, he knew that this would have to outlive him.
[00:31:47] Yeah. Wow. And in 2021 was that bottle 16 was dug up in the middle of the night?
[00:31:58] Yes. So there are four bottles left.
[00:32:02] Four bottles left and what did you discover? Did anything where any of the seeds viable?
[00:32:11] It was so cool.
[00:32:18] So I got to take the bottle after we dug it up and search around in the sand to try and see if I could pull out any seeds before we tried to germinate them.
[00:32:32] Just getting to mess with this sand and know the last person who was tandling it was this guy, Bill.
[00:32:42] Like I know all these papers I see his name everywhere. That was just I was surprised by how powerful that felt.
[00:32:50] It's an museum a bit like it's a yeah. Can I see it to that time? Yeah.
[00:32:55] So when we took the bottle there should have been like a thousand seeds in there.
[00:33:01] They were 141 years old when we dug them up and 20 of them germinated and grew into normal plants that made flowers and made seeds and seemed unaware that any time had passed.
[00:33:24] Incredible. It's been very exciting to see them start growing.
[00:33:32] Yeah, it took I want to say seven days before the first one showed up like truly as the kind of passes like oh water light like let's get this going seven days later.
[00:33:46] I like that part was also surreal that they were just so vigorous.
[00:33:52] Wow and what's it just once one species what what grew? It was basically one species.
[00:34:02] So it's called for bascom blotaria and the common name is moth malene.
[00:34:10] And the reason I said it was kind of one species is there's that what Bill wrote down that he put in the bottle was seeds of a different plant.
[00:34:21] It was the same genus for bascom but he said it was this species, that's which is common malene.
[00:34:28] And these plants don't look like anything alike. The flowers kind of look alike. The seeds look very similar but the leaves and the way the flowers grow on the inflorescence very very different.
[00:34:43] So it's like well, there's some kind of mistake. I don't know who made it or how but we can all all scientists can relate to that experience.
[00:34:52] And then so of this 20 plants that germinated there was one that just looked a little funny and as it continued to grow and mature it was clearly funny looking.
[00:35:07] And it had features of for bascom, that's as well as for bascom blotaria. And so we thought it could be a hybrid. That's certainly possible. So we did genotyping using some DNA and confirmed that yeah it had
[00:35:28] Blotaria DNA and thaps is DNA in the same plant so it was a hybrid between those two parents.
[00:35:35] Which is just yeah how did that happen?
[00:35:39] All of this species that Bill had in his bottles were weedy species at the time. Those species are all still around today.
[00:35:52] Pretty much exactly as they were in Bill's time and there's still kind of weedy. And I'm not quite sure what to make of it but I do think there's something there like a reading us is an important thing too.
[00:36:07] Yeah, respect to the weedy. How good that what we can learn from the weedy species. Not just the mes pests or yeah.
[00:36:16] They've got tricks. We can figure them out. That could be really small. Yeah, they're going to what they do that's why they're weedy right? Yeah.
[00:36:26] Yeah, yeah, the best plants.
[00:36:29] Hmm. Yeah, hybrid is also interesting it's just another example too and we have these kind of clear you know definitions of species concepts and ways that we would like to categorize things but there's a lot of different hybrids in nature and
[00:36:45] they do a lot of interesting things and I don't know for basket and blotter. I know for basket and that's this and just to describe what this plant looks like is it is it kind of similar in form.
[00:36:59] Yeah, yeah. So for basket and blotteria has very dark green again like dandelion style leaves it also grows as a rosette like a rabbit opsis.
[00:37:12] But it's rosette will get to be more like 12 inches across or maybe even a little bigger also.
[00:37:21] Yeah, they're big and then it's different from thapsus because thapsus has hairy leaves and Maria has these very shiny leaves. So that's like very obvious but both of them are biannials which means that the plant will terminate or the seed will terminate and grow for a season and then the whole plant goes through a winter and without that winter period the plant won't flower.
[00:37:50] So it doesn't flower until it's second year and then after it's done flowering and making seeds then the plant is done.
[00:37:57] And the seeds are made in these pretty small capsules but each capsule holds like hundreds of these very tiny seeds.
[00:38:08] And the seeds require light in order to germinate.
[00:38:13] And so when you have like there's this giant rosette covering all of this earth and then you have this tall inflorescence with these capsules that kind of open when they're all dry and the seeds can sort of rattle around and get thrown out of there.
[00:38:29] They might all land next to each other and then one would germinate and grow and make this rosette that covers all of its like sister seeds from that same parent plant.
[00:38:39] And until that rosette goes away, those seeds aren't going to be able to germinate because of this requirement for light.
[00:38:46] So I think that has something to do with like how they're able to last so long is just that the plant itself kind of sheds out its own seeds.
[00:38:56] So it makes that last at least a little while then it wouldn't necessarily be very successful.
[00:39:02] A lot of times if something can last a little while by some like accident, that means they've actually latched on to lasting a very long while.
[00:39:12] Like we're still like at the very beginning of working those details out, but it makes these beautiful flowers.
[00:39:20] They're like really good cottage flowers because it's this tall spike. It kind of has a holly hawk almost look to it and that can be bright yellow or white or deep purple and the center of the flower where the pollen is.
[00:39:35] The stem and have fur sticking out of the side and for blotaria at least it's like hot pink like magenta pink. It's very striking so they're very cute.
[00:39:47] Yeah, amazing and hardy. Yeah, it's interesting that it's so long lived and then the next bottle when it's the next bottle being excavated.
[00:39:58] The plan is for that to be done in 2040.
[00:40:03] Yeah, well. And in nature seeds seeds are stored in situ, right? Not in glass bottles or in freezers. What is the soil seed bank? What's the harmony seeds are in the soil? How long is it hang out there?
[00:40:24] Oh my gosh, it can be, it can be humongous and if there is also depending on how deep you go.
[00:40:34] So it's very dynamic. Seeds are shed and just fall down and seeds are blown in and they're pooped out by birds and they fall off of dogs fur and they look down their river like they just wind their way to someplace in the soil.
[00:40:52] And then there's rain and snow and freezing. So the soil moves around and then there's insects like ants are tremendous movers around of seeds.
[00:41:04] So there's just not very static things things get around a lot. So it's tempting, for example, to think the deeper it is in the soil the older it must be and the soil that's probably true but the seed can just get stuck down there by all kinds of agents.
[00:41:23] But this is a fact that I just wrote down the other day, there's a forest in Germany, a temperate broadly forest. It has the record for soil seed bank density.
[00:41:36] They counted over 500,000 seeds per square meter per square meter.
[00:41:50] 500,000 seeds incredible. And the seeds also represent kind of multiple generations too, don't they?
[00:42:04] Yes, yes. There's some like the be deposited and then germinate the next spring and then there's others that yeah they'll stick around they'll work their way deeper in the soil eventually something might ring them up closer to the surface.
[00:42:21] That's something I think about a lot with these for bascom seeds that were 140 years old. There might be a plant growing in my yard that came from an equally ancient seed and I just don't know how you would tell from looking at it.
[00:42:38] You can, but yeah just because it grew this year doesn't mean that the seed fell less summer like no way.
[00:42:48] So interesting. And okay, now a different kind of seed bank when that you mentioned already the US National Plant, germplasum system what what what what's the acronym?
[00:43:05] I think you're right that overall like that's the big umbrella and where I was specifically was the National Laboratory for genetic resource preservation and LDRP.
[00:43:20] Okay, and they preserve germplasum of all different kinds of life forms with genetic material relevant to agriculture is that is that right what do they what do they do there?
[00:43:37] Yeah they store so there's a whole wing of the building that's about animal germplasum, so that's one thing that could start.
[00:43:46] There's some like bacterial and fungal collection that's happening now and then there's also plants so.
[00:43:55] There's yeah there's a lot of space devoted to crops and just different lines of crops like different varieties you would get at this poor or order from a catalog, but then because it's about genetic resources anything that's like slightly related to crop genetic diversity is also stored.
[00:44:17] So there's like crop wild relatives are a very big deal which are things like they've taken collecting trips to the Kyrgyzstan, which is where.
[00:44:29] Apple originated apple trees and they could get I don't know if they actually brought samples back from there, but I know they like did some research on the genetics of those apples or they've gone to Jordan and surrounding areas to find barley that's growing wild and these are the the relatives of the cultivated barley that we grow in the fields.
[00:44:55] And then aside from that there's a lot of native species or wild species that could preserve to.
[00:45:02] Yeah it's so interesting that not the trend but the presence of sea banks in their history like they were established as seed banks places where you could go and get.
[00:45:18] Seeds to grow and store store seeds that had kind of economic purposes and it's kind of moving.
[00:45:26] More into conservation or I guess expanding their reach and the wild relatives as you were saying they're important for potential disease resistance and everything as well.
[00:45:39] So we're just kind of preserving seeds against different socio political relationships and intentions to write a lot of those.
[00:45:48] I recalltual species are from former Soviet Union areas in having a record or collection in America is kind of important longevity and it was a I don't know has a bank is just the right word isn't it.
[00:46:07] You're right.
[00:46:09] Yeah yeah and there's like there's now gene banks all over the world and they cooperate with each other and so they will have backup collections from other institutes and it's a really big concern to have like what's enough one of you sampled enough and how long will it last and what happens if the first time.
[00:46:36] What happens if the freezer's go down or.
[00:46:40] A hurricane comes or you know there's so many disasters so trying to.
[00:46:46] Fend them off as best we can by backing things up all over the place is a big part of it.
[00:46:54] Yeah yeah huge huge huge so you have it you have an undergraduate degree also in philosophy and I think it's a minor in history and philosophy of science.
[00:47:06] And so the map which is quite you know unique for a lot of scientists do you think having that background has given you a bit of a different understanding of even the study of science or the the role of science or what scientific knowledge is.
[00:47:26] I mean it seems like it.
[00:47:33] I think that my undergraduate degree went was that we spent time reading works by the original authors and discussing it and so reading Newton.
[00:47:50] I think that's a very important thing to do with the reading Aristotle and just having a conversation about it helps make these ideas seem a little more approachable.
[00:48:02] They don't need to be interpreted by someone else necessarily for you to be able to understand it but also just seeing.
[00:48:10] And it's really obvious that like no one is just sitting there coming up with a great idea out of nowhere like this doesn't happen.
[00:48:22] So we spent a lot of time with Tala me who made a whole astronomical system to explain the motion of the planets and the stars if the earth was at the center of the universe.
[00:48:37] It worked like it's it's false but the map like you ate he made the network and then that led to Galileo's discovery or convincing statements about how no the sun was at the center of well something.
[00:48:57] It's just nice to feel like part of a big chain of people working to get some clarity about like what what is going on out there.
[00:49:11] You know but we got some ideas.
[00:49:15] Yeah, I know which is built on built upon and evolves to right and understanding some of these paradigms of.
[00:49:25] Science and of plants I don't know if this is something that you you studied something that I remember.
[00:49:32] I was really interesting to me because I think it reflects maybe not how scientists think about plants that how society kind of treats plants still in like air.
[00:49:45] – auto's hierarchy of souls is that something that you studied.
[00:49:53] I know we've got a lot of Aristotle.
[00:49:59] Maybe not it.
[00:50:01] Yeah, it's just the hierarchy that we see that there's rocks and they kind of have this
[00:50:11] no soul and then there's plants that have a nutritive soul like they do some kind of work
[00:50:19] and then there's animals above plants and then guess who's at the top?
[00:50:26] There's humans at the top but just this kind of this hierarchy of
[00:50:32] feeling and knowing and intellectualizing in a way and plants were just there at the bottom
[00:50:37] whereas we know they do things differently, not lesser than yes.
[00:50:43] Yeah, I mean one thing I still think about from Aristotle is his idea of
[00:50:51] until a K.A. which we had a translation that everyone in the school used or it was translated
[00:50:57] as being at work, day and itself. So everything has even the rocks they have this property like this is
[00:51:03] how you maintain your existence from one moment to the next is that this property of being at work
[00:51:09] staying itself and so I do come back to that a lot in terms of like what is that like for a
[00:51:16] seed? What does that consist of? What work are they doing? Yeah. And you
[00:51:26] right on your bio and of course there's a lot of different potential applications of the seed
[00:51:32] longevity research. What I guess what are some of the different applications
[00:51:38] of this or how might this knowledge be used in the future in ways that we might not be
[00:51:44] anticipating right now? Yeah, I have a friend who's also a seed biologist and she's just applied
[00:51:55] for a NASA program to live in like a biodome in I think Arizona for a year and one of her motivations
[00:52:06] is that she wants to get beans to Mars. We need to figure out a way to get these seeds
[00:52:17] to be productive for people to have a future outside of Earth and there's been work already
[00:52:25] of like sending seeds to the international space station and having them on the outside
[00:52:30] of this space station and then sending them back to Earth after like one and a half two years since
[00:52:36] they survived. They grew. If they were just like out in space, less protection than any of the
[00:52:43] things on the insides it's just so cool but there's also the ability to become dry and become wet
[00:52:55] and become dry again and wet again and still maintain themselves. I think if we can unravel a
[00:53:03] little bit more of the details of how that works it will have tremendous applications for
[00:53:09] things like RNA-based vaccines. For example, because RNA is one of the things that
[00:53:17] is stored inside of seeds and is used by seeds when they're germinating and so they're able to protect
[00:53:25] it without needing to keep it cold or have it in a solution of who knows what chemicals like
[00:53:32] they've figured something out about that but also other things like they also have proteins and enzymes
[00:53:39] and fats that are all being protected so that has great potentials.
[00:53:46] Yeah on the space seeds there was in Australia they sent seeds of the Wal-Mai Pai into space which is
[00:53:55] it has this really fascinating story. It's this I think the family is or KCA. It's a really ancient
[00:54:05] plant that was just known in fossil records and then in the 1990s some mountaineers found
[00:54:12] if you living species in this hidden valley like it's just one specific surviving population of
[00:54:20] this gondwana plant that's like I don't know I'm going to say 250 million years old something
[00:54:26] but they sent it seeds to space and they germinated. It's a survivor. Yeah fascinating just thinking
[00:54:33] about time in that valley and yeah there's a lot of research and pride around the Wal-Mai here.
[00:54:40] Wow. Yeah. So that's another thing and I'm not sure exactly how this would be applied but
[00:54:53] we think a lot about DNA like some a genome is storing information and so this ability to maintain
[00:55:01] that information for hundreds thousands of years basically uncorrupted I think is also a very high
[00:55:12] value. Yep fascinating and oh do you think we'll ever understand all of the the marbles of seeds
[00:55:27] and what they're doing or you think they're going to keep some some of their secrets. Oh I don't
[00:55:35] think we'll ever figure them out. They're just plants are so different. They're so different.
[00:55:45] They fly our human pattern making powers that are just unpredictable and then we figure something
[00:55:53] out it's like oh that makes total sense but then that doesn't make solving the next problem any
[00:55:58] easier that there's always like a twist to it so I think they will tease us and begile us and
[00:56:07] fascinate us pretty much forever as long as we're both around like seeds will be part of us and we'll
[00:56:13] be part of seeds.