by Lloyd Whitehead
Basic research on how plants regulate their growth could lead to innovations in regulating crop growth or developing safer herbicides Biologist GLORIA MUDAY is focusing her career on peering into the mysteries of plant growth.
Armed with grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, Gloria Muday and her colleagues have peered deep inside plants to answer key questions about how gravity and other stimuli affect their growth. But as she points out, the more weighty questions revolve around how plants themselves determine their growth patterns.
"Like animals, plants have hormones that regulate their growth," says Muday, an associate professor of biology at Wake Forest. "Where are they made? How do they act on the plant? How is the hormone transported? These are some of the questions we’re trying to answer."
Muday says that, unlike animals, plants have no apparent means to quickly circulate growth hormones. But plant growth responds to a variety of stimuli, and how this happens isn’t quite clear. "It is generally accepted that environmental stimuli such as light and gravity have a profound effect on the transport of auxin, which acts as the growth regulator. But exactly how the plant controls auxin transport is something of a mystery."
Mysterious as it is, Muday said that gardeners often use auxin transport without knowing it to their benefit. "Gardeners know that by pinching the central bud of a leggy plant they can stimulate growth of the lower branches. What they probably don’t know is that when they do that they are regulating auxin transport. The central bud produces the auxin, and when it is pinched off, the production is picked up by the lower buds." Auxin is even sold at most garden centers packaged as root starter, Muday said.
The research that she and her colleagues are doing today could ultimately lead to innovations in regulating crop growth or developing safer herbicides, said Muday, who prior to coming to Wake Forest in 1991 worked as a research chemist for Sandoz Agro in Palo Alto, Calif. "There are all sorts of practical applications that could come out of this. But the real fascination is with the knowledge itself. We’re unraveling mysteries, we’re taking the time to learn for the sake of learning, which is what I think is the goal at a liberal arts institution."
With the exception of some graduate school work with bacteria, Muday’s career as a biologist has mostly centered around plants, she says. "The fun part of working with plants is that they are so easily manipulated with light vectors, gravity, gene manipulation-- you can do a lot of things with plants that you can’t or wouldn’t do with animals. These studies tell us about both plant and animal biology, though." Muday said there may be an opportunity to put an experiment in space aboard a shuttle mission. "One of our undergraduate students, Randy Luciano, has developed an idea for an experiment with brown algae that could work on the space shuttle. We’re not quite at that point yet, but it is a possibility."
As part of one of the NASA grants, Muday co-teaches an interactive class called Gravitational and Space Biology through the North Carolina network. The course is broadcast to remote locations at universities throughout the state and makes use of technological facilities in DeTamble Auditorium and at Bowman Gray.