Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Listener Questions #47 - Plant Questions (featuring Dr. Manuel Lerdau)

Transcript

Listener Questions #47 - Plant Questions (featuring Dr. Manuel Lerdau) · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:07
Speaker 1: The extraordinaries have requested information on plants that kill. Y'all
0:12
Speaker 1: are making me nervous, but I found a guest to
0:15
Speaker 1: fit the bill.
0:16
Speaker 2: Jane wrote in with a question about cues that seeds
0:19
Speaker 2: need to make them germinate, and wonders why not all
0:23
Speaker 2: seeds respond when they get the same message to activate.
0:27
Speaker 1: Plants are weird, so Kelly says, but her husband wants
0:31
Speaker 1: to know if I need an army of plant clones,
0:35
Speaker 1: how do I make them grow?
0:37
Speaker 2: Whatever questions are keeping you up at night, Daniel and
0:40
Speaker 2: Kelly's answers will make it all right.
0:44
Speaker 1: Welcome to Listener Questions, episode number forty seven, featuring doctor
0:48
Speaker 1: Manuel Lerdau. We found a plant guy.
1:04
Speaker 3: Hi.
1:04
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think
1:06
Speaker 2: about aliens, and my family talks about science at the
1:09
Speaker 2: dinner table.
1:11
Speaker 4: Hello.
1:11
Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Wayner Smith. I study parasites and space, and
1:14
Speaker 1: my family talks about science all the time. Why are
1:16
Speaker 1: you specifying that you talk about it over the dinner table.
1:19
Speaker 1: I feel like there's something you're trying to get at here.
1:21
Speaker 2: If not, everything's that trapped Kelly, Oh my gosh.
1:24
Speaker 1: It is with you Daniel.
1:26
Speaker 5: It is.
1:27
Speaker 4: No.
1:27
Speaker 2: I was wondering how a question from Zach ends up
1:30
Speaker 2: on the podcast. Is this a question that came up
1:33
Speaker 2: over dinner and you couldn't answer it? And you were like,
1:36
Speaker 2: let me put that on the podcast or how did
1:38
Speaker 2: it happen?
1:39
Speaker 1: No, So I am a cruel wife. And Zach was like,
1:46
Speaker 1: I heard about micropropagation and it sounds really interesting, but
1:50
Speaker 1: I feel like that would be a better research project
1:52
Speaker 1: for you than for me, and I want to know more.
1:54
Speaker 1: And I was like, put it in the cube, buddy,
1:57
Speaker 1: And so he had to wait as long as if
2:00
Speaker 1: everybody else usually has to wait, but his turn did
2:02
Speaker 1: come up. And so we are talking about micropropagation today.
2:05
Speaker 2: All right, because I also have a physics question from
2:07
Speaker 2: Zach that's near the top of the queue. That's also
2:10
Speaker 2: been a few months unfortunately. So thank you to everybody
2:12
Speaker 2: who sends in questions, and especially thank you for your patience. Yes,
2:16
Speaker 2: we have such a wonderful community of listeners and question
2:19
Speaker 2: askers that it takes us a little while to get
2:21
Speaker 2: to your questions. We write back to people over email
2:24
Speaker 2: almost immediately, but doing the research and doing the recordings
2:27
Speaker 2: and getting it all edited takes a little while, thanks
2:30
Speaker 2: for hanging on.
2:31
Speaker 1: It does, yes, but we are so glad that you
2:33
Speaker 1: share your curiosity with us. And quite frankly, some of
2:36
Speaker 1: the most fun work that I get to do is
2:38
Speaker 1: digging into some of the questions that y'all ask that
2:40
Speaker 1: I would not get to read about otherwise.
2:43
Speaker 2: Absolutely totally love it. Sometimes I think we should do
2:45
Speaker 2: all listener questions on the pod.
2:48
Speaker 1: I don't think I have enough time. It takes a
2:50
Speaker 1: long time to research these, but.
2:53
Speaker 2: Not when you punt the questions to your friend.
2:55
Speaker 1: That's you know what, if we just want to keep
2:57
Speaker 1: having a rotation of Kelly's friends come through, come on board,
3:00
Speaker 1: we can do that. I feel like we should add
3:03
Speaker 1: a brief disclaimer that we did talk about biology, and
3:07
Speaker 1: sometimes talking about biology results in talking about the birds
3:11
Speaker 1: and the bees. Nothing too extreme in this episode, but
3:14
Speaker 1: you might want to be slightly careful if there are
3:18
Speaker 1: young ears around.
3:19
Speaker 2: We go beyond our usual poop jokes today just.
3:22
Speaker 1: A little just but yes, but we do so. All right,
3:25
Speaker 1: let us wait no more. Let's bring my friend Manuel
3:28
Speaker 1: on the show to answer all the questions y'all have
3:30
Speaker 1: about plants. Doctor Manuelerdao is a professor in the Department
3:35
Speaker 1: of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and he
3:39
Speaker 1: is the research director of the more of in Sustainability Lab.
3:42
Speaker 1: Manuel works on loads of interesting topics, including decomposition, atmospheric chemistry,
3:47
Speaker 1: air pollution, global climate change, the impacts of invasive species,
3:50
Speaker 1: how plants defend themselves against pests, and so much more. Actually,
3:53
Speaker 1: I was not able to figure out a term I
3:56
Speaker 1: could use to describe what Manuel does because it is
3:58
Speaker 1: so diverse and awesome. He's also an Avid Burder. Welcome
4:02
Speaker 1: to the show.
4:03
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for having me. It is a
4:06
Speaker 4: pleasure to be here.
4:07
Speaker 2: You forgot his most important attribute.
4:10
Speaker 1: You're going to say that he lives in Virginia, right, Well.
4:13
Speaker 2: That he's a former Californian.
4:15
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, I see, Yes, Welcome to Daniel and
4:19
Speaker 1: my long running debate about whether or not Virginia or
4:21
Speaker 1: California is better.
4:23
Speaker 2: There's no debate. You just disagree with facts, all right.
4:27
Speaker 1: Well, you know, speaking about disagreeing with facts, Manuel, you
4:30
Speaker 1: wrote me a very polite email to let me know
4:34
Speaker 1: that you listened to our episode about how a species
4:37
Speaker 1: is defined and we did not at all capture how
4:41
Speaker 1: plant species are defined, and as you pointed out, they
4:45
Speaker 1: make up the majority of biomass on this planet. So
4:48
Speaker 1: how would you define species? I'm putting you on the spot.
4:50
Speaker 1: You didn't know I was going to ask you this.
4:52
Speaker 2: This is an episode level digression here. I'm glad to
4:56
Speaker 2: help Nice.
4:57
Speaker 4: Well. For me, species are akin to, but maybe even
5:04
Speaker 4: more interesting than pornography in that.
5:09
Speaker 2: In that no idea where you were going there in that.
5:13
Speaker 4: I may not be able to define them, but I
5:15
Speaker 4: know it when I see it.
5:16
Speaker 1: Oh, got it.
5:17
Speaker 4: And so for plants, which is on the at least
5:22
Speaker 4: on the land surface, that's about ninety percent of the
5:25
Speaker 4: biomass on the land for plants, the whole notion of
5:30
Speaker 4: species is a little more complicated, and we're going to
5:33
Speaker 4: get into that. I have a feeling later in the
5:35
Speaker 4: episode when we start talking about how plants grow and
5:39
Speaker 4: reproduce and different ways to reproduce them. But I think
5:44
Speaker 4: that right now what I would say, for if you
5:46
Speaker 4: were to hold a gun to my head proverbially in Virginia,
5:50
Speaker 4: that's off it literally started. The definition I would use
5:56
Speaker 4: for a plant species is a genetic line whose appearance
6:05
Speaker 4: remained constant relatively through time. Oh, Okay, And what I
6:12
Speaker 4: took out of there from what we plant scientists call
6:17
Speaker 4: the zoological species concept, not the biological species concept, is
6:23
Speaker 4: this idea of reproducing and producing fertile offspring as the
6:29
Speaker 4: thing that defines a species. And the reason for that
6:33
Speaker 4: is that plants have raised, so to speak, interspecific promiscuity
6:40
Speaker 4: to an art form. And we did a study a
6:43
Speaker 4: few years ago, my collaborator and friend, Chuck Cannon, where
6:47
Speaker 4: we looked across tropical rainforests and found that in almost
6:55
Speaker 4: every common group of plants, hybrid is a that is,
7:01
Speaker 4: making fertile offspring across so called species was more common
7:06
Speaker 4: than reproductive isolation. Wow.
7:09
Speaker 2: So they were more likely to make offspring with other
7:11
Speaker 2: kind of plants than with their own.
7:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there's a very good reason for that in
7:16
Speaker 4: a tropical rainforest where the diversity of species, so to speak,
7:22
Speaker 4: is so high. What that means, especially if you're a
7:25
Speaker 4: plant and you can't really walk around and find a mate.
7:28
Speaker 4: But if you're in a forest, Let's say you're sitting
7:32
Speaker 4: in an acre two or three acres of forest, and
7:36
Speaker 4: you're a particular kind of tree, because there are so
7:39
Speaker 4: many kinds of trees in that forest. Yeah, the chance
7:43
Speaker 4: that you will encounter or your pollen will encounter, the
7:48
Speaker 4: female flower of your own kind is very small. And
7:55
Speaker 4: so we did this study feeling very pleased with ourselves
7:59
Speaker 4: that we found this, that in fact, this hybridization is
8:03
Speaker 4: so common. And then of course we learned, as so
8:05
Speaker 4: often happens, that this had been done decades before by
8:11
Speaker 4: a very famous plant biologist named Vern Grant, who publishes.
8:17
Speaker 4: Then we found that it had been described even earlier
8:20
Speaker 4: than that, and in fact they had already come up
8:24
Speaker 4: with a term for it, which is unfortunately not used anymore.
8:29
Speaker 4: And that is, and it's kind of jargony sounding, the singamion,
8:35
Speaker 4: that is, the sharing, the mixing of gamets of reproductive cells.
8:40
Speaker 4: So I try not to talk about plant species so
8:44
Speaker 4: much when I'm teaching as a plant singamion. So, for example,
8:49
Speaker 4: in Virginia, we have red oaks and we have black oaks,
8:54
Speaker 4: And if you spend any time out in the forest,
8:56
Speaker 4: you realize that a half to two thirds so the
9:00
Speaker 4: oaks you actually see are somewhere in the middle between
9:03
Speaker 4: the two, all right, And that's because they form a sydingamion.
9:08
Speaker 2: So maybe we shouldn't think about California podcasters, Virginia podcasters,
9:13
Speaker 2: we should think of a podcast, Gammian A Blend.
9:18
Speaker 4: I'm not going to wade into your personal relations and
9:23
Speaker 4: how your various spouses might feel about these things.
9:26
Speaker 1: Guys, I don't know what that implies behind the scenes
9:28
Speaker 1: is happening on this podcast. So I'm going to move on.
9:30
Speaker 4: But I will wager that a talented cartoonist could do
9:35
Speaker 4: something with this if.
9:38
Speaker 1: I don't, and so we'll move on to the next
9:40
Speaker 1: qut No, i'mkidding obviously.
9:42
Speaker 2: Well, since you raised the question of spouses, I asked
9:44
Speaker 2: my spouse, who's microbiologist, about plants and some of these questions,
9:48
Speaker 2: and she said that she thinks of plants mostly in
9:51
Speaker 2: terms of the microbes that live on them, and basically,
9:54
Speaker 2: to her, plants are like apartment complexes to host the microbes,
9:57
Speaker 2: so they're basically just scaffolding for the interest bits.
10:01
Speaker 4: Hmmm, well that's bit. I mean. I'm married to a musician,
10:07
Speaker 4: so we have a different set of issues. But my
10:11
Speaker 4: experience professionally with microbiologists is that's how they tend to
10:16
Speaker 4: view plants, animals, everything that's not a microbe, Yes, it's
10:20
Speaker 4: simply a scaffolding for the microbes that they're interested in,
10:25
Speaker 4: and they're not necessarily wrong.
10:27
Speaker 2: Exactly what I was thinking when she said that, Am
10:28
Speaker 2: I also a scaffolding to you? Anyway, We're not going
10:32
Speaker 2: to dig into my marital issues on today's podcast. Let's
10:34
Speaker 2: answer the questions from listeners, because that's why Manuel is here.
10:38
Speaker 4: That sounds good.
10:39
Speaker 1: So first, we're going to start with two questions on
10:42
Speaker 1: a similar theme, and these are questions about poisonous plants.
10:45
Speaker 1: This is another line of questioning that makes me wonder
10:48
Speaker 1: if the Extraordinaries are actually a big group of supervillains
10:51
Speaker 1: that are using Daniel and Me and our friends for
10:54
Speaker 1: information about how to take over the world or kill
10:56
Speaker 1: their enemies. So let's go ahead and listen to those
10:58
Speaker 1: two questions.
10:59
Speaker 3: Now, Hey, Dank, throughout the show, quick question, do you
11:04
Speaker 3: guys ever get into the biology of deadly plants like scopolamine?
11:11
Speaker 4: The tour that kind of thing.
11:14
Speaker 3: I don't remember an episode on plants specifically, so I'm
11:19
Speaker 3: just curious if it's has ever come up or if
11:23
Speaker 3: it's on your radar.
11:25
Speaker 4: Thanks.
11:25
Speaker 3: This is Tan from Oklahoma State.
11:27
Speaker 1: How the Extraordinaries. Listener Rennix from our Discord community submitted
11:32
Speaker 1: a question, but then didn't have a chance to listen
11:34
Speaker 1: to the episode or record themselves. So I'm going to
11:37
Speaker 1: go ahead and read their question for them, and then
11:40
Speaker 1: they can listen to the episode when they have some
11:42
Speaker 1: more time. Here's the question biology question for Kelly Wiener Smith.
11:46
Speaker 1: As a cat lover, I'm very aware that things that
11:49
Speaker 1: are harmless to me, like Lily's garlic, etc. Are toxic
11:53
Speaker 1: to cats. I also know feeding sheep with high copper
11:56
Speaker 1: feeds meant for cattle can quickly kill them. Why is
11:59
Speaker 1: it that different things can be toxic to what appear
12:02
Speaker 1: to be relatively similar organisms. I'd expect differences between say,
12:07
Speaker 1: a fish and a beetle, but it seems odd to
12:09
Speaker 1: me that it can vary significantly between mammals. All right,
12:15
Speaker 1: so killing people with plants? So let's start simple. Why
12:21
Speaker 1: do plants produce toxic chemicals?
12:23
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I think the easiest way to get
12:26
Speaker 4: at that is to think about all the things a
12:30
Speaker 4: plant cannot do. A plant can't run away, a plant
12:35
Speaker 4: can't really throw a punch. Some are quite good at
12:39
Speaker 4: tripping you, but on the whole plants are stuck where
12:43
Speaker 4: they are. Yeah, and they don't move that much, and
12:46
Speaker 4: the world is a nasty, scary place, and you have
12:50
Speaker 4: to be able to defend yourself, and plants generally have
12:56
Speaker 4: two ways to defend themselves. One is what we call mechanical,
13:01
Speaker 4: so being really tough and strong, like the outer bark
13:04
Speaker 4: of a tree or the spines on a cactus. And
13:08
Speaker 4: the other is chemical, and that is, if someone's gonna
13:13
Speaker 4: eat you, they're gonna pay for it. And that's why
13:16
Speaker 4: so many plants are poisonous. In fact, pretty much all
13:21
Speaker 4: plants have at least one chemical to try to deter
13:27
Speaker 4: animals or fungi or bacteria from eating them. So we
13:32
Speaker 4: know about some of the poisons because they're famous in
13:35
Speaker 4: human history and have been really important for us, but
13:39
Speaker 4: really all plants have.
13:40
Speaker 2: Something This reminds me of something I read a long
13:43
Speaker 2: time ago about plant genomes, something about how plant genomes
13:47
Speaker 2: are surprisingly larger than human genomes and maybe because of
13:51
Speaker 2: all the complex biochemistry they have to do to produce toxins.
13:55
Speaker 2: Is there a connection there.
13:56
Speaker 4: That's a really interesting question. And even before we had
14:00
Speaker 4: genomes measured, the plant chemists knew something about plants that
14:07
Speaker 4: made them really different from animals, which is they have
14:11
Speaker 4: much more chemical diversity than animals do. And then and
14:17
Speaker 4: about I'm going to get my dates a little run there,
14:20
Speaker 4: But I would say the late nineteen eighties, two plant chemists,
14:25
Speaker 4: when they started looking at the genes underlying the production
14:29
Speaker 4: of these chemicals, discovered that, in fact, plants have genes
14:36
Speaker 4: for more toxic chemicals than they actually make. Oh so
14:42
Speaker 4: the genome is sitting there ready to go in case
14:47
Speaker 4: they need to make a new toxic chemical. In case
14:52
Speaker 4: an insect who's a particular pest learns to overcome the
14:57
Speaker 4: toxin that's used, the plant can turn and on something else.
15:01
Speaker 2: So not only do they have a whole storehouse of
15:05
Speaker 2: poisonous bits to throw at things, they have a backup
15:07
Speaker 2: library of other poisonous bits they can brew up in
15:10
Speaker 2: a moment's notice. Exactly, Wow, I'm scared of plants now, yeah.
15:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, So any of our extraordinaries who are super villains
15:17
Speaker 1: should jump in the lab and start looking at what
15:19
Speaker 1: the plants aren't using yet and see what they can
15:21
Speaker 1: do with that.
15:22
Speaker 2: Isn't it amazing from that point of view that, like
15:24
Speaker 2: any plants are edible.
15:26
Speaker 4: Well, in fact, if you look at wild plants, the vast,
15:31
Speaker 4: vast majority of them are not, and in fact, much
15:36
Speaker 4: of domestication of plants has involved making them no longer
15:42
Speaker 4: poisonous to us. For example, there are wild tomatoes growing
15:47
Speaker 4: throughout North and South America. All of them will kill you. Whoa,
15:52
Speaker 4: and you don't want to ever eat a wild tomato.
15:55
Speaker 4: We domesticated them, and we got the toxins out of them.
16:00
Speaker 4: If you've ever eaten a potato, you know that when
16:03
Speaker 4: the potato has green coming out, you don't eat the green.
16:07
Speaker 4: You always cut off the green. Why is that that's
16:10
Speaker 4: the vestige of the toxin in the potato we bread out?
16:15
Speaker 4: We've removed out by selection on the potato, the toxins
16:20
Speaker 4: in the part we eat, but the rest of it
16:23
Speaker 4: will kill you.
16:25
Speaker 1: Wow.
16:25
Speaker 2: For those of you who've never eaten a potato, it's
16:28
Speaker 2: a delicious tuber you can find in many places, including
16:32
Speaker 2: California and Virginia. But does that mean that the delicious
16:35
Speaker 2: French fry has in it still the genome to produce
16:39
Speaker 2: poisons that would kill you?
16:40
Speaker 4: Exactly? It does. Wo. So the class of compounds that
16:46
Speaker 4: are in the tomato and the potato, they're very closely related.
16:49
Speaker 4: That will kill you are a set of compounds called alkaloids,
16:54
Speaker 4: and if you reach yourlock Holmes, you've run into that word.
16:57
Speaker 4: So if you look at the cell in the potato
17:01
Speaker 4: tubrew that which we're eating, they have the genes for
17:04
Speaker 4: those alkaloids as well, but they don't express them, they
17:07
Speaker 4: don't turn them on. And keeping those genes quiet is
17:11
Speaker 4: why we can go back to McDonald's more than once.
17:17
Speaker 1: Even if it's not really good for us.
17:19
Speaker 2: So every time I eat a salad, I'm basically having
17:22
Speaker 2: to say thank you to the salad for not killing me,
17:25
Speaker 2: because it basically has a gun pointed at my head
17:27
Speaker 2: and it's not pulling the trigger.
17:29
Speaker 4: Right, If we domesticated animals to slow them down so
17:33
Speaker 4: they wouldn't be able to run away from us like
17:35
Speaker 4: cows and pigs, we domesticated plants so they wouldn't kill us.
17:41
Speaker 1: So do we know what those alkaloids do when they're
17:44
Speaker 1: inside of us to kill us?
17:48
Speaker 4: I guess that answer really depends on what do you
17:50
Speaker 4: mean by weed? There is an enormous field of study
17:56
Speaker 4: of how different plant toxins affect different animals and the
18:02
Speaker 4: ways in which they affect different animals. It's not something
18:06
Speaker 4: I know a lot about I know a few of
18:09
Speaker 4: the really cute stories because they've been involved with things
18:13
Speaker 4: that I've worked on. So, for example, I worked some
18:17
Speaker 4: years ago on one of the on the tree that
18:21
Speaker 4: is most closely related to nutmeg. Nutmeg, you know, it's
18:25
Speaker 4: a yummy spice. It has a beautiful, beautiful red fruity
18:32
Speaker 4: like thing called an aarrowl that surrounds it, and that
18:36
Speaker 4: airwl is quite toxic to people, but birds love it,
18:42
Speaker 4: and birds actually lack the metabolic ability to uptake that toxin,
18:50
Speaker 4: so they can eat the aarrowl and this happens quite frequently.
18:53
Speaker 4: So for example, actually in both Virginia and California, we
18:59
Speaker 4: have Virginia poison ivy in California poison oak, and they
19:04
Speaker 4: have these gorgeous light blue berries in the fall, and
19:09
Speaker 4: something in the name poison should tip you off not
19:11
Speaker 4: to eat them. But if you go in the fall
19:16
Speaker 4: when the berries are ripe during bird migration, birds inhale
19:21
Speaker 4: those berries. They just love them, and they're actually very
19:25
Speaker 4: important nutrition sources for certain migratory bird species swallows, for example,
19:32
Speaker 4: and they're not bothered at all. So birds are really
19:37
Speaker 4: different from mammals in a lot of ways. One we
19:41
Speaker 4: don't think about as often is they can eat things
19:44
Speaker 4: that we can't.
19:45
Speaker 2: I love how toxicity is both dose dependent, right how
19:49
Speaker 2: much of it you get? And also species dependent. Can
19:52
Speaker 2: I ask a question about poison ivy? I have always
19:54
Speaker 2: wondered about because I once took a cross country road
19:57
Speaker 2: trip with Katrina from California to Chicago, and we stopped
20:01
Speaker 2: and had a really nice picnic in what looked like
20:05
Speaker 2: a very nice field, and then later developed terrible rashes
20:08
Speaker 2: and went back and found our pictures and we were like,
20:10
Speaker 2: oh my god, that was all poison ivy. But my
20:13
Speaker 2: question is, like the delay. You know, I get that
20:16
Speaker 2: something tastes spicy, or bites you or stings you, it
20:19
Speaker 2: teaches you not to touch it, not to eat it,
20:21
Speaker 2: But poison ivy, it's like, I'm gonna do nothing but
20:25
Speaker 2: put this on your skin, and then days later, when
20:27
Speaker 2: you've forgotten who I even was, then I'm gonna make
20:30
Speaker 2: you suffer. So why the delay? It seems like very ineffective.
20:34
Speaker 4: First of all, I assume Katrina is the microbiologist in
20:38
Speaker 4: your life. She is, yeah, so just remind her of
20:41
Speaker 4: that story when she talks about plants as only scoffolding.
20:45
Speaker 4: They're also enemies.
20:48
Speaker 1: Take that, Katrina.
20:49
Speaker 4: But to answer your question, so that question has been
20:52
Speaker 4: around for a very long time, and actually some of
20:55
Speaker 4: the very first colonial naturalists hmm Long or Darwin. We're
21:01
Speaker 4: asking the question, what's the point of something that gives
21:05
Speaker 4: us a rash three days later? And it is probably
21:10
Speaker 4: we don't know this, We don't have great evidence for this.
21:12
Speaker 4: It's probably a side effect, not the evolutionary purpose of
21:20
Speaker 4: the toxin. The toxin in poison ivy will make you
21:24
Speaker 4: very sick, very quickly if you eat the leaves. Yeah,
21:28
Speaker 4: nobody does, so they don't realize that sometimes people will
21:34
Speaker 4: burn poison ivy and they get that toxin inhale and
21:39
Speaker 4: they get very sick, very quickly. So it's probably actually
21:44
Speaker 4: not an intended purpose for this rash. And in fact,
21:48
Speaker 4: most animal most mammals in the forest don't get rashes.
21:53
Speaker 4: The poison ivy oil doesn't actually ever even get to
21:56
Speaker 4: their skin.
21:57
Speaker 2: Well, my rash was bad enough that when I went
21:59
Speaker 2: to the dermatologists, she had the reaction of hold on
22:02
Speaker 2: a moment, I have to go get my colleagues. I've
22:04
Speaker 2: never seen anything like this, and they all clustered around me.
22:09
Speaker 1: Well, you're only telling part of the story.
22:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think this is kind of a family show.
22:13
Speaker 4: We might want to move on side.
22:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay, So you mentioned that birds can eat
22:19
Speaker 1: poisonous berries and they're fine, and so is there can
22:24
Speaker 1: I think probably the answer is obvious to a lot
22:27
Speaker 1: of people who know how like seeds get from one
22:29
Speaker 1: place to another. But let's just bottom line this, Why
22:31
Speaker 1: is it that plants are letting birds do that?
22:33
Speaker 4: Essentially, so, a lot of the fruit that birds eat
22:37
Speaker 4: has very small seeds inside of them, and those seeds,
22:42
Speaker 4: especially the ones eaten by birds, are small and not
22:47
Speaker 4: particularly hard, but the skin, the outermost surface of that seed,
22:55
Speaker 4: is chemically very tough. And so what happens is that
23:00
Speaker 4: that seed is small enough and oddly enough squishy pliable
23:05
Speaker 4: enough that they can pass right through the bird's digestive
23:08
Speaker 4: tract and then come out in the poop. And one
23:12
Speaker 4: of the great things about many birds is that they
23:15
Speaker 4: eat It takes them ten, fifteen, twenty minutes to digest.
23:20
Speaker 4: That's it. By then they're somewhere else, and that gets
23:24
Speaker 4: the seeds dispersed. That is how the plant who can,
23:29
Speaker 4: as we said, they're stuck where they are. That's how
23:31
Speaker 4: they get their seeds around is through bird dispersal, and birds,
23:36
Speaker 4: of course fly and they tend to move farther than
23:39
Speaker 4: a lot of animals. So bird dispersal is a very
23:42
Speaker 4: efficient way to move your seeds around in the forest
23:46
Speaker 4: or the field.
23:47
Speaker 2: And I imagine a pile of bird poop is a
23:49
Speaker 2: great place for your seeds to land.
23:51
Speaker 4: It's pretty good. I mean, I think the real advantage
23:55
Speaker 4: is that you are far away from your mom. And
24:01
Speaker 4: there's a real advantage for plants and maybe others, maybe
24:05
Speaker 4: people too, to try and grow up far away from
24:08
Speaker 4: your parents. And in the case of plants, and this
24:11
Speaker 4: comes back to the aforementioned Katrina, the advantage of growing
24:17
Speaker 4: up away from your mother is that imagine a tree
24:21
Speaker 4: who's sitting there for two hundred years. That's a long
24:25
Speaker 4: time from microbes and fungi to grow up and be
24:31
Speaker 4: around you and those fungi that might not be too
24:35
Speaker 4: bad for an adult tree, that two hundred year old
24:39
Speaker 4: one would make life really hard for the baby. So
24:44
Speaker 4: there's what we call, to go into science jargon, negative
24:49
Speaker 4: density dependence. That is the further away you can get
24:52
Speaker 4: from your mother, with the reason of course the more
24:56
Speaker 4: likely you are to succeed. And this explains that pattern
25:00
Speaker 4: I mentioned earlier of having very high diversity in the
25:04
Speaker 4: tropical rainforest. Right. Tropical rainforests are warm and wet, great
25:08
Speaker 4: places for fungi to grow, and so you don't want
25:12
Speaker 4: to be right next to your mom because she's probably
25:14
Speaker 4: hosting some fungi that would be really bad for you.
25:17
Speaker 2: So in the plant kingdom, there's no benefits to having
25:20
Speaker 2: a mom. There's no like protection or transmission of you know,
25:25
Speaker 2: immunity or antibodies or anything.
25:28
Speaker 5: Oh.
25:28
Speaker 4: I mean that the plants also have sperm and eggs,
25:33
Speaker 4: and so anything that you can carry through in an egg.
25:37
Speaker 4: Plants don't have the same immune systems of course as animals,
25:41
Speaker 4: So there's you know, there's no there's no mother's milk analog. Yeah,
25:45
Speaker 4: but reptiles and birds don't have that analogue either.
25:48
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to stick up for moms here, I mean,
25:50
Speaker 2: somebody has to. You've been bashing them for minutes here.
25:54
Speaker 1: Plants are different. I'm okay with this.
25:57
Speaker 4: No, I think. I mean, what plant moms do a
26:00
Speaker 4: very good job of is creating the environment around that
26:05
Speaker 4: seed so that the seed has a good chance to develop,
26:09
Speaker 4: all right, but they realize that maybe that seed doesn't
26:12
Speaker 4: need to develop with them.
26:14
Speaker 1: Tough love.
26:14
Speaker 4: If you love your seed, disperse it.
26:19
Speaker 2: Wow, that advice works in so many ways.
26:21
Speaker 1: So we've talked about how plants aren't necessarily producing toxins
26:25
Speaker 1: to go after birds because they want the birds to
26:27
Speaker 1: eat their seeds and distribute them. But then you get
26:29
Speaker 1: weird things like one listener pointed out that sheep I
26:34
Speaker 1: think can't have copper, but goats can, and that she
26:38
Speaker 1: loves garlic but it would kill her cats. Is there
26:41
Speaker 1: an evolutionary reason for that level of specificity within like
26:46
Speaker 1: sort of animals that have kind of similar strategies or
26:49
Speaker 1: is that just kind of bodies work different and throw
26:52
Speaker 1: up our hands.
26:54
Speaker 4: A lot of it is bodies work different. So copper,
26:57
Speaker 4: I'm I actually love copper. I didn't know you were
26:59
Speaker 4: going to bring that up. We worked on copper and
27:02
Speaker 4: plants a few years ago because it's sort of weird
27:05
Speaker 4: and mysterious there. Copper is really interesting because all animals
27:10
Speaker 4: need copper. You need copper. You can't do respiration, you
27:14
Speaker 4: can't breathe without copper, and copper is part of how
27:19
Speaker 4: the energy is transferred and compounds are made in respiration,
27:25
Speaker 4: and so everybody needs copper, and it's toxic at high levels.
27:30
Speaker 4: So the amount of copper that you keep in your
27:33
Speaker 4: cell and where you put it in your cell at
27:36
Speaker 4: any one moment is incredibly tightly regulated because if you don't,
27:43
Speaker 4: your body will take up copper and it'll end up
27:47
Speaker 4: acting as a toxic And actually a lot of the
27:50
Speaker 4: reasons it's toxic at high levels are chemically the same
27:55
Speaker 4: that let it be so important at very low levels
27:59
Speaker 4: to keep you alive for respiration. So plants and copper
28:03
Speaker 4: are even more special as you might imagine because they're plants,
28:07
Speaker 4: since that they're special that copper is also used in
28:12
Speaker 4: plants in this really neat pathway. I'm going to jump
28:17
Speaker 4: into jargon for a moment again because it's the name.
28:20
Speaker 4: It's called the escorbate pathway. And if you're into human nutrition,
28:25
Speaker 4: you know the scobate is vitamin C, and so plants
28:29
Speaker 4: have this very meat a scorbate pathway for dealing with
28:36
Speaker 4: very chemically reactive compounds that they make when they get stressed.
28:41
Speaker 4: So there's a score bait pathway is what keeps plants
28:45
Speaker 4: from self poisoning. And it requires copper also, and so
28:51
Speaker 4: you need plants need copper. Some of it goes into
28:54
Speaker 4: a scobate and some of it goes into what we
28:58
Speaker 4: call electron transport, that part of respiration and photosynthesis. And
29:03
Speaker 4: the reason that plants have to sort of have this
29:06
Speaker 4: special problem. It all comes back to the fact that
29:10
Speaker 4: plants are stuck and can't move around. And for almost
29:16
Speaker 4: all plants, how do they get their food. They capture
29:19
Speaker 4: sunlight and they use the energy that they capture from
29:23
Speaker 4: the sun to turn carbon dioxide into sugar. Now, the
29:29
Speaker 4: problem is if you're a plant, you can't control how
29:33
Speaker 4: much sunlight you capture always and sometimes there's more sunlight
29:39
Speaker 4: and thus you're trapping more energy then you can use
29:43
Speaker 4: to turn carbon dioxide into sugar. And in that case,
29:47
Speaker 4: and we're getting really close to physics here, in that case,
29:51
Speaker 4: you have enough energy in there that you end up
29:55
Speaker 4: with singlet oxygen not O too, but oh which actually
30:00
Speaker 4: becomes O minus and that is really poisonous. And you
30:06
Speaker 4: need a special detoxification pathway to take care of that
30:12
Speaker 4: odd oxygen. And that's why plants need that copper in
30:17
Speaker 4: that ascorbid pathway is to take care of all the
30:21
Speaker 4: odd oxygen. Now we get this. You know, if you
30:25
Speaker 4: go into your health food yoga store, you'll read about
30:29
Speaker 4: antioxidants and buy foods that are antioxidants. Well, that's the
30:33
Speaker 4: same thing. We make low levels of odd oxygen. But
30:37
Speaker 4: it's not really such a problem for us. Plants are
30:40
Speaker 4: producing this all the time when the sun is bright,
30:44
Speaker 4: and they need a specialized chemical pathway for it. So
30:48
Speaker 4: they have things that are toxic to themselves too. So
30:51
Speaker 4: that sounded like a lot of fascinating chemistry. I didn't
30:53
Speaker 4: hear any physics in them. Well, you know, oxygen O
30:56
Speaker 4: versus O two.
30:57
Speaker 2: Let's see, you don't get that without a physics, right, Yeah,
31:01
Speaker 2: I guess physics is just perspective. So it's pizza night,
31:05
Speaker 2: and I'm making my pizza with like fifty cloves of
31:08
Speaker 2: garlic on it. I always wonder when I do that, like,
31:11
Speaker 2: is there a limit to how much garlic you can
31:14
Speaker 2: put in your food? Can you poison yourself with garlic?
31:18
Speaker 2: Or am I free to just keep going to infinite
31:20
Speaker 2: garlic pizza?
31:22
Speaker 4: I mean, empirisist, I would say, let's do the experiment.
31:27
Speaker 4: I don't necessarily want to be part of the experiment.
31:30
Speaker 4: But I'll read about it.
31:32
Speaker 1: You'll be hard to replace as a co host, Daniel.
31:36
Speaker 4: So the chemicals that make garlic taste good are the
31:40
Speaker 4: very same chemicals for most people. There are a few
31:45
Speaker 4: people who are unable to eat garlic. They react very
31:48
Speaker 4: badly to it. And there's sulfur based compounds in the garlic.
31:53
Speaker 4: That's what gives it that strong flavor, and some people
31:57
Speaker 4: react very badly to that. Now, all of those compounds
32:01
Speaker 4: at high enough levels will cause problems. Remember I said
32:05
Speaker 4: that there are and you use the phrase dose dependent earlier.
32:10
Speaker 4: All plants have chemicals in them that if you need
32:13
Speaker 4: enough of them, you will not be able to digest it,
32:17
Speaker 4: and it will cause at the very minimum indigestion. My
32:21
Speaker 4: guess is that if you're able to eat garlic at all,
32:25
Speaker 4: you probably have some kind of dose dependency, and at
32:31
Speaker 4: some point it would get too much and you would
32:34
Speaker 4: probably get sick to your stomach from it. The easiest
32:37
Speaker 4: example for people to know about is the fact that
32:42
Speaker 4: the chemicals in leaves that give them their toughness and
32:46
Speaker 4: structure thing. It's called tannins and ligden and all of
32:51
Speaker 4: these chemicals what they do. Tannins are the famous ones
32:54
Speaker 4: because tannins are what are in tea, and tannins are
32:59
Speaker 4: not exactly toxic to most organisms at reasonable levels, but
33:06
Speaker 4: they do inhibit the digestion of protein, so they make
33:10
Speaker 4: you a much less efficient eater. So imagine you're a
33:16
Speaker 4: bug eating a leaf, and as you eat the leaf,
33:21
Speaker 4: you want the protein in that leaf because your protein
33:24
Speaker 4: concentration is ten to fifty times greater than the leaf.
33:29
Speaker 4: So you need to eat a lot of leaf to
33:31
Speaker 4: get your protein every day. You don't get it from
33:34
Speaker 4: milk or anything. So you're eating all that that means
33:37
Speaker 4: you're eating all that tannin. That tannin actively interferes with
33:43
Speaker 4: your protein digestion, and so.
33:45
Speaker 2: It's a trade off.
33:47
Speaker 4: And of course, from the plant's perspective, the reason it
33:50
Speaker 4: doesn't just fill itself with toxins is that if it
33:53
Speaker 4: did that, well, then it wouldn't have chemicals for photosynthesis
33:58
Speaker 4: and for reproduction. Have to balance how much you defend yourself. Now,
34:04
Speaker 4: bugs are pretty smart too, and what a lot of
34:06
Speaker 4: insects have figured out how to do is to have
34:11
Speaker 4: an early stage in digestion where they chemically modify the
34:15
Speaker 4: tannin before it interferes with protein. Digestion, so they've sort
34:21
Speaker 4: of worked around it. Humans don't have that workaround, so
34:25
Speaker 4: we could have our protein digestion very much inhibited by tannins.
34:30
Speaker 1: Okay, let's send that answer on over to Tan and
34:34
Speaker 1: see what they have to say.
34:36
Speaker 3: Hey, Dank, that was excellent. I learned a ton the
34:42
Speaker 3: bit about alkaloid gene just sitting dormant and potatoes and
34:47
Speaker 3: tomatoes and is ready to switch back on That kind
34:50
Speaker 3: of blew my mind. So I will never look at
34:53
Speaker 3: French fry descend away again. Hey, keep up the show,
34:56
Speaker 3: make it last. I hope you guys never go away.
34:59
Speaker 3: Syndicate this thing if you can. Thanks again, paydful.
35:02
Speaker 4: I'm going to.
35:02
Speaker 1: See and we're back. And the next question is Jane
35:26
Speaker 1: from Red Car England. And so, Daniel, do you want
35:28
Speaker 1: to go ahead and get in your You love Jane's accents.
35:31
Speaker 2: I love jane accent. Listen to It's melodic and harmonious
35:37
Speaker 2: and it also just seems like she's having fun thinking
35:39
Speaker 2: about science. Nice to hear from you again, Jane.
35:42
Speaker 1: All right, so let's go ahead and hear Jane's question.
35:44
Speaker 6: Hi, Daniel, but mainly Kelly. It's Jane from Red Car
35:48
Speaker 6: England again. Now I know that I'm greedy, but I've
35:52
Speaker 6: got another question. What causes seeds to german it. I
35:57
Speaker 6: know that some plants need fire to germany it, another
36:00
Speaker 6: needs several weeks below zero celsius. Sorry, and moisture and
36:05
Speaker 6: light also affect germination. But that's not what I mean.
36:10
Speaker 6: If you saw several seeds in the same conditions, not
36:14
Speaker 6: all of them will germinate. So what is the spark
36:17
Speaker 6: that sets it off? I presume that it's some sort
36:21
Speaker 6: of chemical reaction rather than divine intervention, and once cell
36:26
Speaker 6: division starts, it is complex but understandable. But how does
36:31
Speaker 6: it start? Is it some random quantum process, in which
36:36
Speaker 6: case Daniel should be answering. After all, I'm still loving
36:40
Speaker 6: the show. You and Daniel, as well as being so
36:43
Speaker 6: intelligent and great science communicators are just so much fun
36:48
Speaker 6: to listen to, Even when the jokes are painful and
36:52
Speaker 6: the poetry is more magonagal than keats. I always find
36:56
Speaker 6: myself smiling as I learned something new. So I can't
37:00
Speaker 6: wait to hear what your aunts will be.
37:03
Speaker 1: Thank you always lovely to hear from Jane and so Manouel.
37:07
Speaker 1: Let's start from the beginning what does germinating mean for
37:10
Speaker 1: those of us who weren't in intro biology for like
37:14
Speaker 1: twenty years or something.
37:16
Speaker 4: Well, I used to teach at Sunny Stonybrook, which is
37:20
Speaker 4: on Long Island right outside of New York City, and
37:23
Speaker 4: we had a lot of students who were not native
37:27
Speaker 4: English speakers. And when I would get to germination in
37:31
Speaker 4: intro bio, one of the first points I'd have to
37:34
Speaker 4: make I learned this only by not saying it one year,
37:37
Speaker 4: is it has nothing to do with becoming German, completely
37:41
Speaker 4: independent of that.
37:42
Speaker 1: Okay.
37:43
Speaker 4: So germination is a really interesting thing. And germination occurs
37:49
Speaker 4: when the plant in the seed form decides that instead
37:56
Speaker 4: of being in the form of a seed, it's going
37:59
Speaker 4: to be in the form of what we think of
38:02
Speaker 4: as a plant, something with a stem, something with leaves,
38:06
Speaker 4: and something with roots as sort of the stereotypical example,
38:10
Speaker 4: and that transformation, so it's genetically exactly the same. That
38:16
Speaker 4: transformation from seed to differentiate itself with leaves and stems
38:23
Speaker 4: and roots is germination.
38:26
Speaker 1: Okay. So, so like you know, with humans, when it's
38:28
Speaker 1: time to go from being like I don't know, a
38:31
Speaker 1: fetus to a baby, there's like a nine month window,
38:33
Speaker 1: and when that nine month window passes, you come out
38:37
Speaker 1: of the body and there's so it's like a very
38:39
Speaker 1: fixed time thing. But with seeds, is it like you
38:43
Speaker 1: wait three weeks until you go from being a seed
38:45
Speaker 1: to a plant or is there different cues for that?
38:49
Speaker 4: So I guess I'm kind of going to push back
38:52
Speaker 4: on your idea that you go from being a fetus
38:55
Speaker 4: to a human being. Okay, in a sense, when you're
38:58
Speaker 4: a mammal, as soon as fertilization occurs, you are developing,
39:05
Speaker 4: and you are initially just dividing, and then you're dividing
39:10
Speaker 4: and differentiating, and then all of a sudden, at some
39:13
Speaker 4: point you're born.
39:15
Speaker 2: And it's not like you're only linked to some internal clock, right,
39:17
Speaker 2: you're marinated in a bath of signals from the mom right.
39:21
Speaker 4: And you're marinated in those signals. But if you're a
39:23
Speaker 4: bird or a reptile, you start as an egg, but
39:27
Speaker 4: as soon as you fertilized, you are developing. Now, in
39:32
Speaker 4: many animals that are born from eggs, the rate that
39:35
Speaker 4: you develop is temperature dependent, but you're always developing. Seeds
39:42
Speaker 4: are really really different. A seed is a plant. It's
39:47
Speaker 4: not a developing organism along the way to a final
39:52
Speaker 4: adult form. It's an adult in itself. A seed is
39:56
Speaker 4: not a baby plant. A seed is a plant.
39:58
Speaker 2: A seed isn't a adult. That's mind blowing.
40:02
Speaker 4: A seed could be thought of as an adult. Wow, right, seed,
40:05
Speaker 4: there's fertilization occurs, and what happens after fertilization is that
40:12
Speaker 4: it becomes a seed.
40:13
Speaker 2: So in a plant democracy, seeds could vote well.
40:16
Speaker 4: The male seeds. Yes, we don't let females who remember
40:22
Speaker 4: we're in Virginia right, Oh, why you're raining down the
40:26
Speaker 4: bombs over here?
40:27
Speaker 1: I am retrospectively upset about the getting away from your
40:30
Speaker 1: mom comments because now I am seeing anti female sentiment
40:34
Speaker 1: throughout all of this.
40:36
Speaker 4: No, no, no, But it's an important distinction both in
40:40
Speaker 4: ecology and in evolutionary terms, because that seed is something
40:46
Speaker 4: that in some species can survive for years, decades, centuries,
40:52
Speaker 4: even sometimes millennia.
40:54
Speaker 2: Amazing, And it is not.
40:57
Speaker 4: That it is a plant frozen in development. It is
41:00
Speaker 4: itself what it is now. It's unique and different in
41:05
Speaker 4: that it's not drawing resources from the environment, it's not
41:09
Speaker 4: metabolically active, and so it challenges the idea of what
41:13
Speaker 4: it means to be quote alive. Oh, it's a little
41:17
Speaker 4: bit metabolically active, not very The question I'll rephrase your question, Kelly.
41:24
Speaker 4: The question is what causes a seed to decide to
41:29
Speaker 4: go from being one form, the seed form, to being
41:33
Speaker 4: that differentiated quote plant form, the leafy form. Okay, And
41:37
Speaker 4: that's where things get interesting because for some plants that
41:43
Speaker 4: decision is a chemical one. Right. There are some seeds
41:48
Speaker 4: that need to Remember we talked about the seed going
41:51
Speaker 4: through the bird digestive tract or mammals some mammals as well.
41:55
Speaker 4: That seed needs to pass through the physical and chemist
42:01
Speaker 4: scarification of its surface so that it can germinate. Other
42:07
Speaker 4: seeds need a certain period of low temperature before they
42:13
Speaker 4: can germinate. Still, other seeds need a combination of low
42:18
Speaker 4: temperature and water before they can germinate. Essentially, what it
42:24
Speaker 4: all can be explained by is that seeds are somehow
42:30
Speaker 4: able to use cues from their environment. It might be
42:34
Speaker 4: the intestinal tract of the bird or the spring rain
42:38
Speaker 4: in the desert as a queue to say, okay, this
42:42
Speaker 4: is a good time to go from being seed form
42:46
Speaker 4: to being leaf form. So that is what germination is
42:50
Speaker 4: little different than animal development.
42:53
Speaker 1: And so why would you need the cold spell. What
42:55
Speaker 1: does the cold spell tell you?
42:57
Speaker 4: Well, think if you're we've got we're in July now,
43:03
Speaker 4: and in Virginia and in California, you've got grasses now
43:07
Speaker 4: who are beginning to set seeds, and those seeds are
43:12
Speaker 4: going to see at some point rainfall. And if they say, ooh,
43:18
Speaker 4: it's nice and rainy, let's germinate and grow. If they
43:21
Speaker 4: do that in October in Virginia, they're going to be
43:25
Speaker 4: seedlings when it starts to freeze. Bad idea. They don't
43:30
Speaker 4: want to do that, so they say, Okay, I'm going
43:33
Speaker 4: to need some kind of a low temperature signal for
43:38
Speaker 4: long period months before I turn on my water sensitivity.
43:44
Speaker 4: And of course this is one of the great things
43:47
Speaker 4: scientists are trying to figure out now who work on
43:50
Speaker 4: seed germination, is what is that low temperature sensor that
43:54
Speaker 4: they're using that says, okay, two weeks of low temperatu,
44:00
Speaker 4: sure we're not enough to make the water sensitive, but
44:03
Speaker 4: four months are And what genetically is happening in that.
44:07
Speaker 2: But to bring us a little bit back closer to
44:09
Speaker 2: Jane's original question, you know, I think a common experience
44:13
Speaker 2: is you buy a bunch of seeds, you put them
44:14
Speaker 2: in the ground. You treat them all the same. They're
44:16
Speaker 2: basically the same place. Some germinate, some don't, Some grow fasts,
44:20
Speaker 2: some don't. Is that genetic variation among the seeds. Is
44:23
Speaker 2: that some sort of historical difference in the seeds before
44:26
Speaker 2: they came to you, or is there some quantum mechanical
44:29
Speaker 2: randomness where they're sensitive to cosmic ray muons.
44:32
Speaker 4: So, if you're buying your seeds at in Virginia, we
44:36
Speaker 4: buy our seeds from Southern States Cooperative. You buy seeds
44:40
Speaker 4: who have received all the chemical and temperature treatment that
44:46
Speaker 4: that species of plant might need to be able to
44:50
Speaker 4: germinate when you put it in the ground and water it.
44:52
Speaker 4: So you put it in the ground, you water it,
44:54
Speaker 4: it is primed and ready to go. That's why you
44:58
Speaker 4: buy the seeds, is that you don't want to have
45:00
Speaker 4: to worry about letting them sit in your freezer or
45:04
Speaker 4: in your refrigerator over a winter. You buy them, you
45:07
Speaker 4: plant them, they grow.
45:08
Speaker 2: So this is something I didn't understand at all. You're
45:11
Speaker 2: saying seeds have a very complex steat of germination requirements
45:15
Speaker 2: and highly variable and when you buy seeds, all that
45:17
Speaker 2: work has been done for you except for the last step,
45:20
Speaker 2: put it in the ground and water it.
45:21
Speaker 4: Wow. And so this is another thing that we did
45:24
Speaker 4: when we domesticated plants. A lot of the seeds you
45:27
Speaker 4: buy erre of domesticated plants where we have reduced the
45:32
Speaker 4: number of experiences the seed needs to have before it germinates.
45:38
Speaker 4: Most domesticated plants, we've selected them to be very fast germinators. Wow.
45:44
Speaker 2: Domesticating plants seems like a lot of work.
45:46
Speaker 4: Well, you know, we've been at it for a long time.
45:49
Speaker 4: We started roughly twelve thousand years ago, exactly, all right.
45:53
Speaker 2: So you were saying that purchased seeds are primed to go.
45:57
Speaker 4: All right, Now, some of them don't. And that largely
46:01
Speaker 4: occurs for a couple of reasons. One, those seeds were
46:05
Speaker 4: improperly fertilized to begin with, and the seed developed, but
46:09
Speaker 4: it wasn't really viable, and there's nothing you could have
46:12
Speaker 4: done to make it work. Sometimes those seeds were fine,
46:19
Speaker 4: but maybe because they were so primed to go, some
46:23
Speaker 4: of them sat for too long and they actually they
46:26
Speaker 4: were a little bit too active in the seed form.
46:29
Speaker 4: Before I corrected myself and I said, they're not entirely
46:33
Speaker 4: inactive as seeds but they're largely inactive. But if they're
46:37
Speaker 4: you know, they could be a little too much in
46:38
Speaker 4: the seed and then they're not able to go. And
46:42
Speaker 4: some of it is you think you're doing it all right,
46:46
Speaker 4: but you don't always do it all right. But one
46:49
Speaker 4: of the things that happens is that when people who
46:53
Speaker 4: sell seeds learned that certain ones are not germinating well
46:57
Speaker 4: from their customers, they often start doing things differently to
47:01
Speaker 4: try to improve that germination rate. And that's why it
47:05
Speaker 4: is so high. Now you can see this same sort
47:09
Speaker 4: of thing in wild plants. You can collect acorns and
47:14
Speaker 4: do what you need to do to the acorns so
47:16
Speaker 4: that it will germinate. And different species of oaks have
47:19
Speaker 4: different requirements. They won't all germinate. Usually that's because they
47:25
Speaker 4: didn't all develop along the way properly. And is that genetic?
47:29
Speaker 4: Is that environmental? It's really hard to say. I would
47:34
Speaker 4: say it's internal, but it could be genetic, it could
47:37
Speaker 4: be environment But.
47:39
Speaker 2: It sounds like if you have seeds with the same
47:41
Speaker 2: genetics and you give them exactly the same experience, then
47:44
Speaker 2: you should get the same germination. Yes, there's no real randomness.
47:48
Speaker 4: No, this is one of the few cases where the
47:51
Speaker 4: physics the muons are not that important, although.
47:56
Speaker 2: It underlies everything, of course, absolutely everything.
48:01
Speaker 1: So do you have any stories for like the most
48:04
Speaker 1: complicated set of conditions that a plant has needed before
48:07
Speaker 1: it will germinate. Do you have like a favorite example
48:10
Speaker 1: of a plant being high maintenance And is it sequoia trees?
48:16
Speaker 4: You know, maybe it's because I've have and I'm still
48:19
Speaker 4: in the midst of raising up three high maintenance offspring,
48:24
Speaker 4: But I think I think the really interesting stories involve
48:29
Speaker 4: the low maintenance ones. And I think that these cases.
48:34
Speaker 4: There's a lovely study still going on and I think
48:38
Speaker 4: it's a about I think it's about one hundred and
48:41
Speaker 4: twenty years old right now. It started about one hundred
48:43
Speaker 4: twenty years ago at Michigan State University where they took
48:47
Speaker 4: seeds and put them in pots and buried them many many, many, many,
48:52
Speaker 4: all identical, and they've been digging them up. I think
48:56
Speaker 4: it's every ten years maybe and germinating from the and
49:00
Speaker 4: seeing how germination rates change with time, and they're still
49:05
Speaker 4: getting incredible germination. And what's amazing in these studies is
49:10
Speaker 4: that they now have plants growing today who were adapted
49:17
Speaker 4: to the environment in East Lansing, Michigan, one hundred and
49:21
Speaker 4: twenty years ago, and so they can actually study evolution
49:26
Speaker 4: by comparing these seeds from one hundred and twenty years
49:30
Speaker 4: ago with seeds that come from individuals today. They can
49:35
Speaker 4: study how what adaptations have occurred. And there have been
49:40
Speaker 4: similar kinds of works on people who find seeds. There
49:45
Speaker 4: was a guy who was actually not working on plants.
49:48
Speaker 4: He was working on ancient condors. You know, condors used
49:52
Speaker 4: to occur pretty far into the Western United States, they
49:57
Speaker 4: weren't just on the coast. So he was studying condors,
50:01
Speaker 4: fossil condors and ancient condors in packrat middens in the
50:06
Speaker 4: Rocky Mountains, and he discovered seeds while he was looking
50:11
Speaker 4: for condor bones, and so they germinated some of these seeds.
50:15
Speaker 4: And these are seeds from thousands of years ago. So
50:19
Speaker 4: you can actually study adaptation in real time across centuries
50:27
Speaker 4: and millennia because of the ability of seeds to not
50:31
Speaker 4: germinate when the conditions aren't right.
50:34
Speaker 1: And the seeds from the condor poop did germinate still, well.
50:39
Speaker 4: They weren't in the pond or poop, they were in
50:40
Speaker 4: the packrat you know, the you know, pack rats have
50:42
Speaker 4: these middens, these little oh yeah, yeah, little tiny caves
50:45
Speaker 4: where they bring stuff and they store stuff. And they
50:49
Speaker 4: had bones in there, and they had seeds in there,
50:51
Speaker 4: and so you can take the seeds and germinate them
50:54
Speaker 4: and see what the plants from that time were like.
50:56
Speaker 4: And this is not long enough for new species, but
51:00
Speaker 4: it is long enough to see adaptation that changes in
51:03
Speaker 4: the environment.
51:03
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
51:05
Speaker 2: All right, super fascinating. Shall we send this out to Jane.
51:08
Speaker 1: We should send this off to Jane. All right, Jane,
51:10
Speaker 1: what do you think?
51:12
Speaker 6: Wow? Please thank Manuel for answering my question, which I'm
51:16
Speaker 6: stunned to hear is at the cutting edge of science.
51:20
Speaker 6: There were so many cool facts in this answer, like
51:24
Speaker 6: a seed is a whole plant. I believe Manuel called
51:28
Speaker 6: it an adult in itself, and they're just primed and
51:32
Speaker 6: ready to go, just waiting for the right resources to
51:35
Speaker 6: kick things off. But I am relieved that were not
51:39
Speaker 6: reliant on muons. I didn't appreciate that commercial seed merchants
51:44
Speaker 6: prepared seeds so carefully, but that begs a question if
51:49
Speaker 6: some seeds, as Manuel suggested, need to pass through the
51:54
Speaker 6: gut of a bird or an animal before they germinate.
51:58
Speaker 6: How on earth is this achieved commercially? Thank you once
52:02
Speaker 6: more for satisfying my thirst for more science knowledge.
52:07
Speaker 4: Hi Kelly, thanks for that interesting question from me, Richard.
52:10
Speaker 4: On the whole, this need for physical passage through an
52:15
Speaker 4: animal gut has been bred out of domestic planks. So
52:19
Speaker 4: when you buy seeds for flowers or vegetables for your garden,
52:24
Speaker 4: they largely don't need that kind of physical abrasion that
52:29
Speaker 4: they get by passing through the bird or the manmal
52:32
Speaker 4: intestinal trapped. And that is one reason that many wild
52:35
Speaker 4: plant scenes have lower germination rates than domestic ones. The
52:40
Speaker 4: wild plant seeds are missing animal scarification that they may
52:45
Speaker 4: still require. One example where people on the East coast
52:49
Speaker 4: of the United States or Europe can see this is
52:52
Speaker 4: with a plant called wineberry. Wineberry is a European kind
52:56
Speaker 4: of raspberry that is very common as a wild plant
53:00
Speaker 4: but has never been domesticated. Wineberry rates of germination are
53:05
Speaker 4: much lower than the germination rates of domestic raspberries. There
53:09
Speaker 4: are some seed sellers who use physical abrasion to increase
53:14
Speaker 4: germination orate. You see this on the packet with the
53:17
Speaker 4: fancy word scarification. That usually means they just rolled the
53:22
Speaker 4: seeds around with some rocks to break up the seed
53:25
Speaker 4: coat a little bit. But of course, if any animals
53:29
Speaker 4: are used for scarification, it's likely goats, because, as you
53:34
Speaker 4: well know, people who raise goats are lovely, willing to
53:37
Speaker 4: try anything, and sometimes a little wacky.
54:00
Speaker 1: This last question comes to us from my favorite web cartoonist.
54:04
Speaker 1: Turns out I do know a good web cartoonist, and
54:06
Speaker 1: I'll change my tune and be nice here for a second,
54:09
Speaker 1: So Zach, go ahead and ask your question about micro propagation.
54:13
Speaker 5: Hello, this is Zach Wienersmith. I'm a nine year old
54:16
Speaker 5: retiree from Japan, and I was just reading a book
54:23
Speaker 5: on horticulture and I came across this idea of micro propagation,
54:28
Speaker 5: where somehow you use cells from plants to grow a
54:31
Speaker 5: bunch more plants. And I'm wondering, as are my friends
54:35
Speaker 5: here in Germany, exactly how that works. Thanks a huge
54:41
Speaker 5: fan of the podcast, Good Day, Sir and Madam.
54:47
Speaker 2: Zach is not just a web cartoonist, He's quite a gardener.
54:50
Speaker 2: I've been to the farm. I know he's like always
54:52
Speaker 2: involved in planting or growing something. Doesn't he have like
54:55
Speaker 2: a bunch of trees where he's like grafting this onto.
54:57
Speaker 1: That he hasn't started the grafting yet, but he has
55:00
Speaker 1: planted a bunch of trees and he plans on doing grafting,
55:03
Speaker 1: and he planted sixty paw paw plots this year and
55:09
Speaker 1: the hope that he'll get to do some pawpaw grafting
55:11
Speaker 1: and stuff in the coming years.
55:13
Speaker 2: And so are you queen of the animals and he's
55:16
Speaker 2: king of the plants. Is that how things divide over there?
55:18
Speaker 1: That's right? And I thought that made me superior. But
55:20
Speaker 1: Manuel is pointing out that the biomass is in Zac's favor.
55:24
Speaker 1: But anyway, yes, he's quite the gardener. He would say
55:27
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what he's doing, I think, but he's
55:29
Speaker 1: he's learning as he goes. Would he No, I'm pretty not.
55:32
Speaker 2: Sure he would say that. He would say, all right,
55:35
Speaker 2: I'm sure.
55:35
Speaker 1: He'll weigh in on his comment at the end. So
55:37
Speaker 1: all right, what is micro propagation? So Manuel and I
55:41
Speaker 1: agreed that I was going to try to explain this
55:44
Speaker 1: first and that then he would jump in nice. So
55:47
Speaker 1: let's see how this goes. Okay, So you know, folks
55:49
Speaker 1: who have house plants know that sometimes you can cut
55:53
Speaker 1: off a piece of the house plant and like stick
55:54
Speaker 1: it in soil or stick it in water, and you
55:56
Speaker 1: get a whole new plant. And so that is a
55:59
Speaker 1: way to get at more plants quickly. But that's not
56:02
Speaker 1: fast enough if you want to be selling like thousands
56:04
Speaker 1: and thousands and thousands of a plant to people who
56:08
Speaker 1: you know there's a plant that's in great demand and
56:10
Speaker 1: you need to have a lot of them quickly. And
56:12
Speaker 1: so micropropagation involves essentially taking certain parts of the plant,
56:18
Speaker 1: sterilizing it so that you're getting rid of all of
56:20
Speaker 1: the bacteria, all of the fungus, et cetera. And then
56:23
Speaker 1: you put it in a little environment with hormones and
56:27
Speaker 1: other cues that the plant uses. And one of the
56:29
Speaker 1: things that you can do is create in these like
56:32
Speaker 1: little containers with hormones is callous where you get a
56:35
Speaker 1: lot of undifferentiated plant cell so that they haven't become leaves,
56:39
Speaker 1: they haven't become roots. They're ready to become something eventually,
56:42
Speaker 1: but at the moment they don't really know what their
56:45
Speaker 1: future holds. And so you get lots and lots of
56:47
Speaker 1: these cells and then you can break them up gently
56:50
Speaker 1: and put them into different containers with different sets of hormones,
56:54
Speaker 1: and each one of those will become a new plant.
56:58
Speaker 1: And so you can essentially have this stage. You're growing
57:00
Speaker 1: up a bunch of cells in an environment. You separate
57:03
Speaker 1: those cells out, you give them different hormonal cues, and
57:06
Speaker 1: now you can get thousands, maybe even millions of these
57:08
Speaker 1: plants much more quickly. What have I gotten wrong so far?
57:13
Speaker 4: Manwell, no, I think you nailed it. I think I
57:17
Speaker 4: was very smart to ask you to do this.
57:19
Speaker 2: Kelly, you're an excellent guest on Menuel's podcast.
57:22
Speaker 4: Here, okay, he points up. I mean, let's go back
57:27
Speaker 4: to Daniel's potato there right. He points up the fact
57:31
Speaker 4: that these cells throughout the plant are genetically identical, and
57:39
Speaker 4: it highlights one of the really interesting differences between plants
57:44
Speaker 4: and animals. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one,
57:48
Speaker 4: which is that plant cells have a lot of flexibility
57:55
Speaker 4: compared to animal cells. And even though when a leaf develops,
58:02
Speaker 4: those cells that are formed by the cells are growing,
58:06
Speaker 4: they divide the leaf. It's bigger and bigger and bigger,
58:10
Speaker 4: and those cells all become leaf cells. They're not fixed
58:15
Speaker 4: to doing that the way a lot of animal cells
58:18
Speaker 4: are If you can pull those cells out of the
58:21
Speaker 4: leaf environment, and that's what micropropagation is, they become equivalent
58:29
Speaker 4: functionally to stem cells in animals. That is, they can
58:34
Speaker 4: then become anything they want and you can grow them
58:38
Speaker 4: up in the right balance of hormones and sugar. Remember
58:42
Speaker 4: they need a food source. You can grow them up
58:45
Speaker 4: into a new plant, and that's micropropagation. And the reason
58:48
Speaker 4: it works so well with plants is that this is
58:54
Speaker 4: called de differentiation, which is almost impossible with animal cells.
59:00
Speaker 4: Once you have a liver cell, it's almost impossible to
59:05
Speaker 4: have it begun anything but another two more liver cells.
59:09
Speaker 4: On the other hand, a plant cell from a leaf,
59:11
Speaker 4: from a stem can become that plant. Now, coming back
59:16
Speaker 4: to all, I forget who it was who asked about germination, Jane.
59:23
Speaker 4: What you don't seem to be able to do in
59:26
Speaker 4: micropropagation is take that callous and have it developed directly
59:33
Speaker 4: into a seed. That doesn't happen. And it's not clear
59:40
Speaker 4: why that is so impossible, but of course you could
59:42
Speaker 4: imagine that if you were trying to grow something where
59:45
Speaker 4: the seed is the crop, it would be lovely if
59:48
Speaker 4: you could do that, right, Yeah, Skip that whole step
59:51
Speaker 4: of the apple tree, just go apple to apple to apple,
59:55
Speaker 4: and that doesn't work. We can't do that. We seem
59:59
Speaker 4: to only able to propagate from a callous the leaf
1:00:04
Speaker 4: form of the plant, and nobody knows why.
1:00:07
Speaker 1: That is interesting. I bet if you could figure that out,
1:00:09
Speaker 1: you'd make millions, maybe billions.
1:00:12
Speaker 4: Right, I would not be on your I would not
1:00:15
Speaker 4: be sitting at the Yorks Virginia or on this podcast.
1:00:17
Speaker 2: Would be the planet King.
1:00:19
Speaker 4: No, I would still be on the podcast. I definitely
1:00:21
Speaker 4: be on the podcast, but I wouldn't be it.
1:00:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't be a professor anymore.
1:00:26
Speaker 4: I wouldn't be in the lab on a Friday, on
1:00:28
Speaker 4: Friday before July fourth.
1:00:29
Speaker 2: Okay, you know if I made a billion dollars, I
1:00:31
Speaker 2: would still be a physical professor.
1:00:33
Speaker 4: Well, it's it's easy to say that.
1:00:36
Speaker 2: It was pretty easy to say that you're right, But
1:00:38
Speaker 2: I think it is, like, you know, this is what
1:00:40
Speaker 2: I enjoy doing every day.
1:00:41
Speaker 1: So can you when you're going to make that callous?
1:00:44
Speaker 1: Can you take cells from any part of the plant
1:00:48
Speaker 1: or are there some cell types that work better?
1:00:51
Speaker 4: Well, there are some cell types where it's easier, okay,
1:00:54
Speaker 4: and a lot of that has to do with what
1:00:58
Speaker 4: kind of cell wall is around the cell. Another important
1:01:03
Speaker 4: way that plants are really different from animals is that
1:01:07
Speaker 4: plants and cells, in addition to having that membrane that
1:01:11
Speaker 4: we all have, also have a wall, a fairly rigid
1:01:16
Speaker 4: wall around them. So micropropagation often you want to work
1:01:21
Speaker 4: with cell types that have the thinnest, most pliable, most
1:01:25
Speaker 4: easy to degrade cell walls, because that's the whole side
1:01:30
Speaker 4: of micropropagation that becomes that's tricky and important. It turns
1:01:34
Speaker 4: out that cell walls are a challenge for the plant
1:01:39
Speaker 4: as well, right, because if you're gonna divide and split,
1:01:43
Speaker 4: you have to break open your cell wall and then
1:01:46
Speaker 4: reform it around the new cells. And so plants have
1:01:50
Speaker 4: a whole really cool genetic system to essentially chemically degrade
1:01:55
Speaker 4: their cell wall just enough so it can split, But
1:02:00
Speaker 4: they don't degrade the whole thing because then they'd have
1:02:01
Speaker 4: to rebuild the whole wall, and they'd spend all their
1:02:04
Speaker 4: time doing that. So in micropropagation it tends not to
1:02:08
Speaker 4: get done on cells that have really heavy, thick cell walls,
1:02:13
Speaker 4: like the parts of wood that are really strong, those
1:02:17
Speaker 4: tend not to be used for.
1:02:19
Speaker 2: Right, that makes sense.
1:02:20
Speaker 1: And then is it safe to assume that when you
1:02:22
Speaker 1: finish doing micropropagation you end up with plants that are
1:02:25
Speaker 1: genetically identical to the plant that you took the cells from.
1:02:30
Speaker 4: Yes, they are literally clones of them. Of course, if
1:02:34
Speaker 4: you do it for long enough, there can be some
1:02:35
Speaker 4: kind of small scale mutation that occurs along the way,
1:02:39
Speaker 4: but essentially they're genetically identical. I mean, the real challenge
1:02:44
Speaker 4: for micropropagation and why you know why not everyone does
1:02:49
Speaker 4: it and why most people just cut off a leaf
1:02:51
Speaker 4: and stick it in, is that one of the very
1:02:54
Speaker 4: first things you said was really important comes back to
1:02:58
Speaker 4: the microbes. That you have to do this in a
1:03:02
Speaker 4: super sterile environment because everything you do when you are
1:03:09
Speaker 4: doing the micropropagation to help the plants grow will help
1:03:13
Speaker 4: the microbes grow also, and what you'll end up doing
1:03:16
Speaker 4: is propagating an enormous microbial colony instead of a plant
1:03:21
Speaker 4: if you don't do it entirely sterily. And microbes and
1:03:26
Speaker 4: plants have this incredibly tight relationship with one another where
1:03:33
Speaker 4: you really don't I mean, your wife is correct again.
1:03:37
Speaker 4: You don't have plants in nature ever without microbial infection ever.
1:03:44
Speaker 4: They're everywhere. That is the challenge in micropropagation, not so
1:03:48
Speaker 4: much the propagation techniques themselves, but getting the environment clean
1:03:53
Speaker 4: enough so that you can do it without micropropagating microbes simultaneously.
1:03:59
Speaker 1: And is this part so I remember at the end
1:04:01
Speaker 1: of micropropagation there's a stage where you have to harden
1:04:04
Speaker 1: the plants back up again because they've been in this
1:04:07
Speaker 1: like perfect sterile, delicate environment. Is part of that process,
1:04:11
Speaker 1: like reintroducing them to the organisms that they kind of need,
1:04:16
Speaker 1: or is it just trying to toughen them up because
1:04:19
Speaker 1: they've been coddled.
1:04:20
Speaker 4: It's interesting. I think probably one of the things that
1:04:23
Speaker 4: you're indirectly doing is toughening them up for the microbes. Okay,
1:04:28
Speaker 4: but usually that hardening is more focused on the physical
1:04:33
Speaker 4: environment and the chemical environment that they're in rather than
1:04:37
Speaker 4: the micro You just you stop being so so ainally
1:04:42
Speaker 4: retentive about sterility and you start letting them struggle a
1:04:48
Speaker 4: little bit more and wherever there is carbon there or
1:04:52
Speaker 4: microbes and so the microbes get there.
1:04:55
Speaker 1: Yay, microbes all right. So some of the benefits of
1:04:58
Speaker 1: micropropagation are that you can quickly get a whole bunch
1:05:03
Speaker 1: of clones of some plant that you really want, and
1:05:07
Speaker 1: if you specifically are trying to make a plant that
1:05:09
Speaker 1: you know tends to have a disease, doing it in
1:05:12
Speaker 1: this sterile environment means that, like when you send this plant,
1:05:15
Speaker 1: for example, to another country, you can be pretty darn
1:05:18
Speaker 1: sure you're not going to be sending that disease to
1:05:20
Speaker 1: another country where it can then go and infect other plants.
1:05:24
Speaker 1: And so sterility is a feature, even if it makes
1:05:27
Speaker 1: things complicated. Does that sound fair, Manuel, Yeah?
1:05:31
Speaker 4: I mean I'm not sure how much that sterile environment
1:05:34
Speaker 4: is important for, say, international shipping or interstate transport. I
1:05:40
Speaker 4: think it's mostly important for getting plants who are not
1:05:46
Speaker 4: only genetically uniform, but have grown up in a really
1:05:50
Speaker 4: similar environment. If you have some who have been infected
1:05:53
Speaker 4: and some who've not been infected, they're going to be
1:05:56
Speaker 4: different plants. I've only been involved in one major study
1:06:00
Speaker 4: where we used micropropagation, and that was with we wanted
1:06:05
Speaker 4: the exact same genotype of a kind of tomato that
1:06:09
Speaker 4: we were working on, and we needed thousands of them
1:06:12
Speaker 4: to grow. And so when you're growing seven five hundred tomatoes,
1:06:17
Speaker 4: you don't garden anymore. For a few years, but we
1:06:20
Speaker 4: were able to do that. That was the main goal
1:06:23
Speaker 4: was to get these identical plants so that we would
1:06:28
Speaker 4: know that any differences we saw were due to the
1:06:30
Speaker 4: perturbations we were exerting on the plants, not to differences
1:06:34
Speaker 4: that they came with.
1:06:36
Speaker 1: I was listening to the in Defensive Plants podcast and
1:06:39
Speaker 1: he was interviewing someone who does orchid conservation, and I
1:06:43
Speaker 1: hear that this is also like a helpful technique and
1:06:46
Speaker 1: some conservation programs or plants as well, where you want
1:06:48
Speaker 1: to grow up a lot of them sort of as
1:06:50
Speaker 1: fast as you can and maintain a bunch of genotypes.
1:06:53
Speaker 1: And so have you heard about this being used in
1:06:55
Speaker 1: conservation for plants as well?
1:06:57
Speaker 4: So it's pretty famous for orchids, okay, And the reason
1:07:01
Speaker 4: for that is that one, people love orchids. Two link
1:07:06
Speaker 4: to one, a lot of orchids are quite rare, and
1:07:10
Speaker 4: three because orchids have such intricate, complicated pollination systems, usually
1:07:17
Speaker 4: requiring a specific species of b to pollinate that orchid.
1:07:23
Speaker 4: It's really hard to get orchids many species to get
1:07:28
Speaker 4: them to make seeds. Because your orchid from South America
1:07:32
Speaker 4: that you're growing in Albamarle County, Virginia may not have
1:07:37
Speaker 4: the right bee, and so your seed production will be low.
1:07:41
Speaker 4: So you can use micropropagation in order to get many
1:07:45
Speaker 4: others of your organ Now you're only getting that genotype
1:07:49
Speaker 4: of that species of orchid, but it's better than nothing.
1:07:52
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's in orchids. It's been hugely important. Anything
1:07:56
Speaker 4: that's really difficult to get pollinated would be good for all.
1:08:01
Speaker 1: Right, let's send this answer to Zach and see if
1:08:04
Speaker 1: we have stated his appetite for knowledge about micro propagation.
1:08:08
Speaker 4: See if he's still.
1:08:09
Speaker 2: Awake after I'll hail the king of plants.
1:08:12
Speaker 1: Oh no, I think the queen of the animals is
1:08:14
Speaker 1: the one that should be hailed.
1:08:16
Speaker 5: Hi, this is Zach Wienersmith. I am a ninety five
1:08:19
Speaker 5: year old retiree here in Geneva, and I just wanted
1:08:24
Speaker 5: to say I appreciated the throw response from Manuel and
1:08:29
Speaker 5: Kelly on The Kelly Show. Thanks very much for answering
1:08:36
Speaker 5: the question and a revoir.
1:08:39
Speaker 1: Okay, and that's our episode. Thanks everybody. If you have
1:08:43
Speaker 1: a question for us, you can send it to Questions
1:08:45
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1:08:47
Speaker 1: questions making on the show and the ones that really
1:08:49
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1:08:52
Speaker 1: So thanks for joining us today.
1:08:53
Speaker 4: Man will all right, take care.
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