This summer, several members of the Moss Lab at Whitman College are studying the molecular details of how pear trees sense and respond to the important plant growth hormone auxin. This work involves tagging pear gene sequences with fluorescence and then putting them into Baker’s yeast cells as a simpler way to study their function in the lab.
As a supplement to the lab work, Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology (BBMB) Brit Moss recently took several students to Wenatchee, Washington, to attend a “WSU-USDA Sunrise Research Farm Field Day” workshop hosted by Washington State University (WSU).
In the orchards, research teams from WSU and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guided participants through various short- and long-term ongoing experiments that ranged from novel techniques to prevent pests from damaging fruits and leaves to understanding the temperature and sunlight thresholds that lead to fruit sunburn.
“It was exciting for our team to see what experimental work in research orchards looks like and explore how the basic biology research they are doing could translate into useful knowledge for breeders and growers,” says Moss.
Whitman students also presented the results of their own summer research projects to collaborators in the Waite Lab at the USDA Agricultural Research Service Tree Fruit Research Lab and toured the research greenhouse and plant tissue culture facilities.
