Drought Resistance and Water in the West

Plants have mouths … well, kind of. More like microscopic holes, called a stoma, usually on the underside of their leaves. This is how they breathe, exchanging oxygen with carbon dioxide. The exchange of gases also allows water to evaporate from the plant into the surrounding air.

This process is extremely important to a plant’s drought resistance, and there are a multitude of factors that affect its efficiency. Understanding those factors and how to potentially manipulate them is important for agriculture, especially in the arid west, and is something that fascinates senior Ty Wilson.

The 24-year-old Rupert, Idaho native has spent the past two years working in Dr. Amita Kaundal’s lab researching plant-microbe interaction at Utah State.

“Looking at the microbes right around the roots, as well as inside the roots and inside the leaf tissue, to see whether or not those microbes have plant-growth promoting characteristics,” Wilson says. “There’s tons of microbes everywhere, but the plants are able to kind of attract the ones that they like.”

Some of the microbe characteristics plants are looking for include nitrogen fixation — essentially the process of turning the plentiful but relatively inert nitrogen gas in the air into more reactive nitrogen compounds found in fertile soil — and iron chelation, the process in which an organic compound binds to iron making it more available for the plant to absorb.

Kaundal, an assistant professor and molecular biologist, says the goal is to develop and test bio fertilizers that will not only help develop stress-resilient crops, but also alleviate the long-term soil destruction caused by a lot of the fertilizers currently being used.

“With climate change, environmental stresses, and the world population increasing … we need to increase the crop production,” Kaundal says. “We are putting tons and tons of fertilizers in the soil, and these fertilizers, they help with this crop production for a little while, but then later on, they just destroy the soil.”

For his part, Wilson, who spent this past summer participating in a 10-week internship at Michigan State University, plans to pursue graduate school and then a career in governmental research working on the molecular side of plants. With the portfolio he’s already developed through his undergraduate research, he’s well on his way.

“I already had two papers published by the time I did this summer internship and had lots of lab experience. So, while other people were getting used to lab work for the first couple weeks, I hit the ground running the first week,” Wilson recalls. “I was able to do more during that internship because I had this background. … I wholly attribute it to the experience that I had doing undergraduate research previously and having prepared presentations and making posters and presenting in the past.”