A bitter triumph

Mustard: ‘the plant fruit fly’

Chelse McKee, staff

Dana Schroeder, an assistant professor and geneticist at the University of Manitoba, with her team of graduate students, is researching the process through which mustard plants use light.

“I’d always been interested in plants,” said Schroeder, as she described her journey to researching mustard plants, otherwise known as Arabidopsis thaliana.

Schroeder, with a background in developmental genetics, spent her graduate years studying the animal model genetic system of a worm. In 1998, Schroeder began conducting post-doctorate research on the mustard plant. She had taken over the project from her supervisor who had begun the project in 1988.

The mustard plant is ideal, according to Schroeder, because of its small size and small genome. It was the first plant to have its plant genome sequenced in 2001.

“It’s basically the plant fruit-fly,” Schroeder said.

The research, which did not have a defined objective when it started, is a continual project.

“By not having solidly defined goals, we were able to follow the science,” Schroeder said.

Currently, Schroeder and her team are observing the process of how plants react to UV light. They have already seen how the mustard plant’s genes and proteins receive light. While plants use light from a visible spectrum to perform photosynthesis, UV light, having more energy per photon, is actually harmful to the plant, similar to the effect on people.

Schroeder said that at any one time,about 500 plants are being observed, all in different phases of growth.

On a normal research day, Schroeder’s team could be growing, looking at, and grinding the plants. Then they will observe their DNA, protein, and cellular levels.

“Depending on what particular question we’re asking that day, there’s a variety of techniques we might use,” Schroeder explained.

Schroeder’s research has helped to possibly make some headway in terms of tomatoes. Due to outside research, it has been seen that tomatoes have similar activity from similar genes to that of the mustard plants. That research could possibly lead to more nutritional elements if the research is cultivated in the growth process of the tomato.

Despite Schroeder’s long relationship with the plant, she claims to have never tasted the mustard plant herself.

“I haven’t done it myself, but it’s a relative of canola and broccoli and that kind of stuff,” she said. “It has the same kind of bitter-tasting compound. I imagine it wouldn’t be that tasty.”