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What Hoh, Kramer and their colleagues did was different. It was more like taking parts from a fleet of different cars, then combining them in different ways to find which arrangement gave them the best handling.
To do this, they started by breeding together two different varieties of cowpea, which are also known as black-eyed peas. One cowpea cultivar is grown in Cameroon, just north of the equator on Africa's west coast. The other is cultivated in California where, being farther from the equator, it has adapted to live in a climate that can become chillier.
Some of the offspring were worse at maintaining photosynthesis in lower temperatures than their parents, but some were better. By measuring the different photosynthetic capabilities along with the different genetics and different fatty acid contents in every plant, the team could pinpoint the "super fat."
"We found not only the specific fat that affects chilling sensitivity, but also the genes that modulate this fat, helping take us one step closer to climate-resilient plants," Hoh said.
To back up that claim, the team turned to a different plant species known as Arabidopsis. With this new knowledge in hand, they bred Arabidopsis plants to either have more or less of the fatty acid than it would normally. In Arabidopsis, too, the less of the fatty acid a plant had, the better its response to cold.
Performing all these experiments and measurements required cutting-edge tools and a collaboration covering a breadth of scientific skills. Joining Kramer's group was the lab of Christoph Benning, an MSU Foundation Professor, University Distinguished Professor and director of the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab. Kramer's team has extensive experience studying photosynthesis—and developing new tools needed to do so—while Benning's team are experts in plant fatty acids.
"This work was made possible by tools the labs have built up and the expertise of people like Donghee to make the measurements," Kramer said. "This wouldn't have happened without putting all those components together."
The question remains why less of this particular fatty acid is beneficial to plants, which underscores a point Kramer made earlier. Nature has evolved some pretty impressive solutions, now scientists just have to figure them out.
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