The pause that refreshes

Last week, more trouble in root land. I had prepared two plates of seeds to see if working without a doofus made any difference to seedling vigor. It didn’t seem to. Difficult to tell for sure because the seeds on one of the plates did not germinate at all. Not a one. That’s never happened before with this new seed batch. Something is wrong, somewhere. Faced with those inert seeds, I started to wonder whether the bouts of shorter root growth I have been seeing, albeit not every time, reflect this mysterious something.

Rather than jumping into testing the next idea, I decided to pause. Take stock. I did find a small space heater and put it in the red room and over the last week I inched up the heater’s thermostat to get the room up to 25?C. If that hasn’t happened by Monday, I’ll go buy a bigger heater. Whatever is going wrong with the maize, having a warmer room will be all to the good.

Further convincing me that there is something untoward afoot (wish I could write “aroot”), the graduate student in my lab, Maura Zimmermann, also got a strange maize result. She wants to study, specifically, the response of the maize root to various temperatures. For her experiments, she has access to a growth chamber and is starting out by working at 30?C, happy maize place. She took advantage of the doofus set-up too and she put a couple of plates in her growth chamber on the same Friday as I put some in my red room. On Monday, I had roots that were a 1 to 3 cm long whereas Maura had roots grown to the bottom of the 12 cm plate and beyond – they were growing sideways around the edges. The shoots were also centimeters long, all jammed in at the top. The difference between her and my seedlings was hilarious and certainly points a finger at temperature.

OK, that makes sense, that is not the strange thing. Naturally, those roots were way too long for Maura to use for an experiment so she set up another set and had a look after 24 h. To her consternation, on one of the plates, there was no growth at all. Just like the dead plate I had set up. WTF?

We have a maize poltergeist. Now it is just a question of testing everything and anything to find out what is scaring the daylights out of our seedlings. I am glad for the help.

One version of the maize ghost. Taken from here: http://card-wa.wikia.com/wiki/Ghost_of_Maize. I have no idea about the original context (!) but the image fits.

While avoiding specters this week, I turned to another project, one that also involves root growth, but in this case with our old friend, arabidopsis. I have a collaborative project with another lab, featuring a talented kinase called Siamese. My job is number crunching. I did some of that last week, sitting at my desk (or even once in a while standing up) and running software. Soothing work in a way, no balky doofuses acting up. I will describe this collaborative project soon, when I can start from the top.