WIRED - Thanks to some genetic tricks, plants can now speak in color. A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside hacked the natural stress response system in Arabidopsis thaliana, a small white-flowered plant from the mustard family that serves as a common model organism in plant biology labs. When exposed to the pesticide azinphos-ethyl, A. thaliana turns from green to red, flagging the contamination loud and clear.
“It’s an unambiguous readout of what’s in the environment,” says Ian Wheeldon, co-lead researcher and a UC Riverside chemical engineering professor. He believes that giving plants the power to share what they’re experiencing, in a way that’s visible to the naked eye, will deepen people’s understanding of them.
This study, published last week in Nature Chemical Biology, is the first to use a visible marker to detect organophosphate pesticides in plants. Sophisticated synthetic biology tools, enabling researchers to turn on gene expression in response to specific environmental triggers, already exist for biological systems like human cell lines and bacteria—single-celled organisms with short life cycles. “In plants, those tools are very limited,” says co-lead researcher and UC Riverside plant biologist Sean Cutler.
Manipulating molecular pathways in complex multicellular plants that take months to grow is much trickier than running experiments in microbes, where a scientist can make a genetic tweak and observe the consequences in a single sitting. With this project, the team aimed to scale these tools up, “building the widgets that allow us to program lots of complicated inputs and outputs in a plant system,” Cutler says.