University Place

>> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my great pleasure to get to introduce to you Paul Williams. Paul came here in about 1960. He's been a professor since 1962. He is fourth in a long line of great cabbage breeders here at the University of Wisconsin, and if you don't think that don't matter, let's talk kraut. Let's talk Franksville. Let's talk about the cradle of breeding plants for resistance to diseases. Paul has a saga going back to 1895 tonight. I think it's one of the great examples of the Wisconsin Idea, the commitment of this university and this university system to never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family of the state and, in this case, every bratwurst in a bun. Because we need cabbage for kraut. He's also going to talk about the development of a model

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Wisconsin Fast Plants. And I think there are very few things a biologist can bestow upon humanity of greater value than to introduce a new model organism, and that's something that Paul and his coworkers have done. They're called Wisconsin Fast Plants. Let's get to it. Please join me in welcoming Paul Williams to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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Well, if you talk and they hear you... >> Can you hear me? No. >> Try it again. >> Can you hear me now? >> Yes. >> Okay, we're good. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. It's wonderful to see so many of some of my younger friends and some of my older friends among the group here. And this evening I'm hoping that we can take you on an interesting story, a Wisconsin story. But before we do that, as is traditional to many things I like to do when I'm in classrooms with teachers, we've got to get down and do some real interesting work. And to do that, we're going to meet the main protagonist of the

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the Astro-Plant. But before we do that, I want to make very sure by introducing my team, the Wisconsin Fast Plant's team. They are here tonight, and so I'd like just to point them out to you here. Hedi Baxter Lauffer is helping me on the mechanics of things as the director of the Wisconsin Fast Plant Program. Dan Lauffer is not here, but Dan makes sure that Hedi is here.

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And Jackson Hetue, my helper here, is the custodian of those very, very important Fast Plant seeds that we're going to be talking about and leading to. So let's get on and meet the main, one of my children. And you have my children. Let's meet the Astro-Plant. Well, you don't have to look at the podium here because you have an Astro-Plant in front of you. And part of our story is going to be about that, but, first of all, let's become plant breeders. So what I'd like you to do is to pick up a little invention that is part of nature. It's on a toothpick called a bee stick in front of you. Pick that bee stick up and make like a bee. What you have here is a honeybee which has already lived a full life in the field creating honey for you. Can you think of anything more fulfilling in the life of a bee than to have a second life in your hands tonight? So we'd like you to do what this bee does. As it collects nectar to make the honey, it's also collecting pollen so that it can have a protein in the diets of its larvae. And I want you to roll that bee over the anthers of the flower, which is a Brassica. We're going to meet Brassicas in spades today. And as you do that, nature's most perfect pollination device is at work in your hands, picking up on the plumose hairs of its thorax, pollen. And then you're going to see there may be little green parts of the flower that are sticking out, just roll that pollen over there, and now you have done a self-pollination because you have taken the sex cells from that plant and put it back on the receptive female part. But you know, nature is full of tricks, wonderful stories that we don't have time to tell here today, but you have just done a self-pollination. Now I'd like you to do is fly you bee to a neighbor behind you or front you and pollinate their flower. And I'd love to hear this hive just working a little bit. Let's hear some buzzing.

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That's right. Buzz. You know, you never know, some kids do this in schools, and one of the very good questions is, if you buzzed, are you a better pollinator? Good. This is what we want you to do because now you have pollinated tonight, and you've actually cross-pollinated as well as self-pollinated. So that's already a biological phenomenon. And this is a real dead bee, and it's a real live plant. So that's kind of cool. So what we're going to do is leave you there. And by the way, these are designed so that you can take them home and pursue, you just put that around your neck when you leave, wrap it up so it doesn't freeze, and then with that little paper clip on there, just tape that to a sunny window and keep your plant moist and see how good you've been at pollinating.

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So let us now talk about tonight's stories. So there really are four stories that we're going to be telling today, and the first of these is this Astro-Plant that you've just talked about is a Brassica. So the first is the Brassica story, and I'm going to take you around the world with me to look at the enormous diversity that exists within the Brassica family. And then we're going to talk about the lineage and the legacy that has brought me here tonight and brought you here tonight, which is a Wisconsin cabbage story. And Tom alluded to that in the introduction. And finally, we're going to take one of the experimental Brassicas that we have been developing over the years and take you on a journey with it that is a wonderful journey that still goes on in the Wisconsin Fast Plants program. So, to begin with, I want to take you, you may say what are Brassicas? Well, let me just in a nutshell say that you're really very familiar with Brassicas. Brassicas are probably part of your life every single day, and I just happen to have gone yesterday to Madison's grocery stores, and before me I have all kinds of Brassicas here, including the products of Brassicas. Canola oil, butter made of canola oil, Dijon brown mustard, and all of these wonderful vegetables that we see here plus a few more that we're going to meet just along the way. But anyway, let me say that Brassica is a very, very large plant family called Brassicaceae. In that family are over 3,000 species of plants, each species different. In that family are over 300 genera. So that means that within each genus of plant, which have special characteristics that make them a genus, are several species. But the type genus for the Brassicaceae family is Brassica. And, as it turns out, there are many Brassica genera that you know in your gardens. Things like candytuft or alyssiums, wallflower are ornamentals. A lot of Brassicas are noxious and nasty invasive weeds like garlic mustard and tumbleweed and all sorts of things. But for the most of them, they are natural plants that are living and they're characterized, a few years ago they were called crucifers because the flower is in the form of a crucifix. And I'm using a Brassica as a pointer here. So here is the cross-shaped flower that characterizes all Brassicaceae. All 3,000-plus species have cross-shaped flowers, have six stamens, and so on. This is going to not be a night of taxonomy because we're going to meet some other characteristics of the family that are important and interesting to humans as we go along. But anyway, here's your grocery story, and one of the things that this says, if these are a family or even a species, how can things that look so different be the same? So this is one of our riddle questions. How can things that look so different? Well, that means in modern day parlance there must be a lot of genetics involved, but let's just look at some Brassicas. Here we are. So in the Brassicas there are six economically important species around the world. We're going to take you around the world quite quickly. These are what you would know them as. The cole crops. Some of you are gardeners I know. The coles are cabbage, broccoli, and I have a coles right here. Here's a cole, a cabbage. That means that they're all Brassica oleracea. Here is a cauliflower. This is really not a flower. It's a curd, and a curd is not a flowering tissue. It's a curd. You know what Mark Twain said about a cauliflower? He was pretty smart way back in the 1800s. He'd been to college. A cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.

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He was right. So then you have broccoli, you know? Sort of the nemesis of the Bush family. Well, daddy Bush.

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He wouldn't eat broccoli, but, boy, did that get the broccoli growers going. So this is flower buds; this is curd. Very nutritious. Well, you know, this is perhaps the most popular, at this being the winter season, and with the new generation. This is a kale. One of many, many kinds of kale. And this is an Asian version of it. These are all Brassica oleraceas. This is Chinese kale. Still Brassica oleracea. You're going to the supermarket, you want the best of the Brassicas, the sweetest of the Brassicas, the most delicious. Here it is. Called kailaan, Chinese kale. It doesn't stop there. This is a Brassica oleracea, kohlrabi. And here is a kohlrabi in flower. So if you want to really have a nice winter flowering plant, grab a kohlrabi and stick it in your fridge for four weeks and then plant it in a bottle growing system. And in three to four weeks, you'll have this lovely flower plant here. Those are all Brassica oleraceas. And then there are Brassica nigra. This is the toughy. This is the toughy of the family Here's Brassica nigra. It's the black mustard. And this is its stem. Well, isn't it interesting that this is a Brassica oleracea. We'll jump back. This is a tree cabbage. It doesn't make a head. It extends its stem, and you find them in Portugal, and if you travel as Julius Caesar did to Britain many years ago and stop on the Isle of Jersey, you left some seed and they became Brassica oleracea walking sticks. This is the stem of Brassica oleracea that's used in the orthopedic hospitals of the United Kingdom because they're light and they're strong. This is also Brassica oleracea, and sadly I didn't bring my specimen for you. This is a Victorian Brassica oleracea that we'll see in a minute, and this is another one of the same. These are Brussels sprouts. After you take the Brussels sprouts off, they make beautiful walking sticks. You can see where all the Brussels sprouts formed on the stick. So Brassicas are used for many, many things. That's just one species. Let's move on to Brassica. You can see a cross here. Something that's rather important here is just to show you that there are a range of six different interrelated species upon which we can draw genetically. But remember, they have been domesticated by humans over millennia, if not centuries. And the interesting thing is this is what a wild Brassica oleracea looks like in its haunt and habitat on the limestone cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Wales with the salty water breaking below. How did things that look so different, how could they be the same? That's sort of the biological and biochemical, the genetic riddle that we're talking about tonight. Okay? So this is the only sort of tough genetic stuff I'm going to give you tonight. So don't sweat that abstract diagram. But this is the genetic interrelationships, indeed the genome of these species. And so what we're looking at is Brassica oleracea here we just showed you a lot of. And this has nine chromosomes called the C genome, the C chromosomes in its sex cells. Nine. That's all those cole crops. Over here is the A genome with 10 chromosomes, and up here, this guy right here, nigra, has eight chromosomes. We call that B. Interestingly in nature, these have crossed over time to create the polyploid or the duplicated genomes, combined genomes of these as species. And so we have here Brassica juncea. You see it up there? That's the A and the B combined. And this one, here we have Brassica juncea as a mustard seed and as mustard greens. Probably America's most nutritious vegetable right here, mustard greens. And why are they called mustard? Because, we'll see in a minute, they have a special chemistry that makes them bite back. So this is just to show you broadly the interrelationships of these six species. Now, let's take a trip around the world and see. The interesting question is, Brassica is better than almost any other species, including the dog, really have demonstrated the process of domestication by different components of the human culture in different geographical settings. In other words, if you live in North China and South China or Ethiopia or Europe, you have different climatic and different cultural conditions as humans we're developing and different needs. The range of Brassicas we eat today are the derivatives of the culture that selected and domesticated from the wild what we're talking about And the parallelism in domestication that served the domesticate need is really interesting. In other words, why did they form a cabbage head out of Brassica oleracea and also a head of cabbage of a Brassica rapa? And we don't have it here today but if you get the Asian market, you'll see Brassica juncea as a head. A mustard flavored cabbage like green. Very cool stuff this is. So let's go around the world quickly and just look at the number one Brassica...

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I guess I missed my little thing here. Can you still hear me okay? The number one is cauliflower, believe it or not. The number one Brassica oleracea is cauliflower. You go over to Portugal, here's a really high version of the tree kale. And if you've got community gardens with Portuguese people in them, they may be getting and growing some of these because these served a very good function. They served as walking sticks, but they could also grow them close together and serve as fencing. Well, they cut the leaves off, much like collard leaves, just cabbage leaves, and had them in their national dish. The national dish of Portugal is at Christmas salt cod fish potatoes and caldo verde, which is the cabbage leaf chopped up. Extremely nutritious. Here's the head. You see the head is designed to store and wrap itself. Next one. Nine genome. Here's more Brassica. These are used as sheep fodder in New Zealand and Scotland. Sheep are grazing on the stems and leaves of Brassica oleracea. Here's broccoli, here's Brussels sprouts, and here's an ornamental aesthetic produced in various parts. So this is an example of how diverse one species, and yet there's parallelism for domestication within the various species we're talking about. Next slide. One thing, so now this is black mustard. This is the one I'm holding the stick of. And the important thing I want to show you here is that there's a chemistry in all Brassicaceae that's called glucosinolates. Most plant families, whether they're rose family, which is your tree fruits and your plums, your Brassicas have specialized secondary chemicals in their plant parts, all of them do, that protect them against pathogens and pests over time. And in Brassica we have the glucosinolates. So this is just a little chemistry, but those are pretty toxic within the cell. So they're compartmentalized, and it's not until the cell compartment is broken that the enzymes come together, they cleave off this glucose, which protects them, it gives up glucose, the kale starts to taste sweeter when you massage it because you're crushing it. But it's not until you bite into it that you release this -- which is bioreactive, and your taste buds tell you what you're tasting. There are about 60 different kinds of R groupings, different kinds of oleraceas. And these are the acquired taste. Most kids know that Brassicas are kind of yucky, but once you acquire the taste, then you've got to have it, right?

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It's just that same old human character. Okay, so this is Brassica juncea, which I've showed you here, in India. Indian food, they like the juncea, and that's, as you can see, a B genome. This is juncea. The French took it and called it Dijon mustard, but in any other terms it's called brown mustard. Go to an Indian store and get brown mustard and you'll have a very spicy Brassica. The one that's least understood but has huge potential for plant breeders is the Brassica carinata. It exists on the horn of Africa in Ethiopia, and it's used as a diverse crop where it comes up in the spring very vigorous, eaten as a green, and then goes on to flower and produce oil which is necessary for the human diet, for the oil soluble vitamins and the calorics. And so Brassica carinata is a huge, when we grow it here in Wisconsin, a single plant would be as big as this space right here. Very interesting to get hold of some carinata seed and grow it in your garden. I always worry it might become a weed. So let's keep on going. Napus is another of these double chromosomes groups. This is canola growing on the polar land of Holland, and it's salt tolerant and often the first or second crop that's put on the reclaimed lands. But it's rich in oil. So this is being grown as an oil seed, both for lubrication in industrial oils as well as edible oils for humans. This is going back to Canada. The number one crop in Canada now, exceeding that of wheat, and number one export. Canola. Here it is right here. Canola oil, canola butter. Canada got in, I know the guys who did this, they developed the glucosinolate-free oil that tasted good, now the most nutritious oil you can get, and they call it Can-Ola oil, and now the world calls it canola.

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Very clever marketing. And again, we're coming back to our old friend Brassica rapa, which is the A genome, because Asia and China have really spent a lot of time across the world domesticating rapa. How we doing here? Okay, so what I'm going to do is say that in China and Korea and Japan many forms of Brassica rapa exist. This is Bai Cai heading Chinese cabbage found in North China. You can see here the mounds of it in Beijing being harvested. You cross the sea to Korea, and this becomes kimchi. And kimchi was around here somewhere. Here we are. Here it is. Here's my kimchi bottle. I always have a bottle of kimchi in the fridge because when I finish making kimchi in the bottle biology book, which is another derivative of the Fast Plant, we have a core, and when we plant the core, which is really the bud, in one of our bottle growing systems, Brassica comes right out of the front of it. You want another winter plant? There's a good way to grow it. So this is just a quick trip and another shot I think will pretty much take you to Brassica rapa, which I've shown you. Okay, the thing about Brassicas that really began to get me interested ties to a knowledge of the organism. And so this is sort of around the world. Just to show you the diversity and still with the question, how can these things that look so different be the same? How can you have so many kinds? We now know why. If it was 50 years ago, we didn't know why. But the genetic world is turned upside down by genomics, and it's wonderful the kind of mysteries that are being resolved by modern genetics. So let's leave our Wisconsin around the world story, and let's go to the Wisconsin story because that's part of my legacy and why I think I'm here tonight with you is that as Wisconsin settlers, many of your forefathers, came in from all over the world but primarily in the 1800s from northern Europe or from New York and Ohio where they had already previously settled, they brought with them their nutritious vegetables, and among the most utilitarian vegetables they could bring was cabbage. So they were growing lots of cabbage because you could grow it in the summer, store it in the winter, have it all winter, make coleslaw out of it, or you could pickle it and make sauerkraut out of it. So cabbage was sort of the king of Wisconsin. And there were massive amounts of cabbage grown here and shipped by rail to Chicago and beyond, all over the country because Chicago was the center of the rail network in the 1800s. You know that. So let's now look at cabbage fields in 1895 in Racine, Wisconsin. The soils were getting very, very sick, and growers didn't know. So in 1895, the newly appointed microbiologist at the College of Agriculture, a guy named Harry Russell, went out to Racine County to this field which was being decimated, he sampled it, he tested it, by a bacterial disease. Well, Russell's work was just beginning because he was a great microbiologist and studied many kinds of animal diseases and so on. It wasn't long before he was appointed dean. And time went on and by 1910, the cabbage fields of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin had another disease called yellows. The crop would start, and then as temperature warmed up in the summer, the cabbages died. Harry Russell went to the man he thought could help him with that, and his name was Lewis Ralph Jones. He was born in Brandon, Wisconsin, but ended up as the head of forestry for Vermont. But he brought him from Vermont, put him in as the professor of plant pathology and established the department that I was fortunate to spend my career in. Here is LR Jones bending over a resistant cabbage plant in a patch of cabbages that has been totally wiped out by yellows. But Jones knew because Mendel's genetics had recently been rediscovered and applied to plant biology. In 1910, Jones arrived here, and he went to the field and pulled that cabbage out and brought it back to Madison right here, put them through a winter in a cold room, and then planted them out, and they flowered. The thing about Brassicas is they need to go through a wintering period before they flower, and usually with a cabbage, that takes one year in the field, a winter cool but not frozen, and then a year to produce a crop of seeds. So it's a two-year crop rotation. Most others take a year or so. So this was the condition of the cabbage fields. Let's take the next shot. This is a shot, composite shot I want to show you. These were the cabbages in 1912 that Jones had pulled out, and that little car in that picture sort of validates the time, doesn't it? Look at that. Can you see the car? This is the horticulture building, or, rather, the ag engineering building. That's the head house. The head house of a greenhouse. Greenhouse was going to be the first experimental equipment that the college build for plant science. That was the first tool because it controlled the environment. So here is the progeny in 1912 of the cabbages that Jones took in 1910, two years later, in the same field, and you can see that row of cabbage. It was like a miracle. They grew. By 1914, they had a whole field of cabbage. And this is a shot of a greenhouse. They planted those cabbages now and set them out in the field, and, waiting for winter, they could put the cabbage right in the greenhouse and warm them up and speed up the cycle to one per year instead of one every two years. That was a great innovation for those days. This is a very interesting picture. Jones really reached notoriety pretty quickly because this is a picture of the University of Wisconsin Regents meeting in Professor Jones's cabbage field in 1916.

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That's a pretty cool picture because the Regents, instead of meeting just in Madison as they do now and who knows what's going to happen to where they meet next, met around the state. So they were meeting in Racine, and they said let's go out and see what Jones has done. There's the picture. Later, by '23, virtually all of the fields of cabbage in Wisconsin were like this, but the disease was still in the fields. You see they put a control row in? This was an experiment of the susceptible originals to show you that you had to have permanent genetic resistance if you were going to be able to grow a crop in Wisconsin against yellows. We're talking about one fungus disease called fusarium. Let's look at what it was like that same year on this campus. Okay, so does anybody know where you think this picture is taken from, and can you see any hallmarks that would tell you where we are? I think some of you. Just take a second to look at that and say, well, where was that camera sitting? The Madison campus was virtually covered with cabbages.

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Well, I'm guessing somewhere like the WARF building or maybe where the hospital is. Okay, so that's just an interesting shot, and notice how they color tinted it. There was no such thing as color photography in those days. Next slide. So this gets a little personal, but I'm part of that cabbage story. I'm proud to say that in 1959 I arrived here to go to graduate school from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. And I worked with this man here, Professor Pound, who was the department chair and later became a very distinguished dean of the College of Agriculture. Some of you might know Glen Pound. What's interesting is that Pound was Walker's student and Walker was Jones' student. And it's just an interesting connection that represents my academic. And we all studied cabbage, except as a grad student I studied radishes.

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So the story goes like this. I arrived in '59, and in my third year of graduate school, in the fall, Glen Pound came up to me in a place that I won't mention right now and said, Paul, we've just decided we want to offer you a professorship. I'm in grad school. It's very dear. GC Walker is retiring next year, and take it or leave it.

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I'm still here trying to get out.

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Never has an offer been made like that. But anyway, let's move forward because this is the man who really set the standards in the Department of Plant Pathology in the first 50 years. GC Walker is a Racine boy who came here. And this is embodying the Wisconsin Idea. Here he was in 1957, as I was for many, many years, in the cabbage fields of Racine County talking to growers, explaining to them the research that underwent there and in the field pulling the same cabbages of the resistant variety. New diseases started to come up because once you've solved one, there's always more. That's one thing. But knowing that Walker was going to retire, the national sauerkraut packers decided that they would build, they asked Walker, what do we need to do to keep you guys going? And he said, build me a greenhouse. And this is the plaque that's on the Walker greenhouse right now. That's a huge greenhouse, part of the Walnut Street range even as we speak. But the interesting thing is they invited me there and said this is the guy that's going to take over. Now that's laying it on heavy.

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But it's still the way you imprint a legacy, and I was very, very fortunate to be given that baton to pass on. So this is the story of the greenhouse. And I was faced with many, many diseases in the first 10 or so years because yellows had been solved, Glen Pound had worked on cabbage mosaics, so my challenge was how to breed multiple disease resistance into the new varieties of cabbage that were coming out and would they be useful beyond Wisconsin because Wisconsin has a limited amount of cabbage grown. Although, it led the nation in sauerkraut production. It was still limited compared to what the importance of worldwide. So as I began to work on cabbage, I had many, many diseases. This is a bacterium, the virus. This is a very serious disease called club root in cabbage growing around the world and is now the number one disease on the canola crop of Canada, and it's being spread by the oil pipeline diggers. Can you imagine? Isn't that nature getting back? Yeah. And this is a nutritional disease called tip burn, but there are many of these. So my challenges were to understand these diseases, understand the genetics underlying them so I could deploy the resistant genes in the varieties and species. Now, cabbage was just one of many crops I worked with, but it's the primary story line for tonight. The thing about cabbage is you need a big greenhouse and a lot of manpower to get the genetic information out. But in order to look at the resistant gene, four resistant genes, you have to go back around the world to the diversity within the species and start to fish out sources of resistance that might be in crops that don't look like they belong in Wisconsin. But the big thing is to understand the underlying genetics and the biochemistry underlying that genetics. And once we have that, then we have new knowledge to create new crops and better crops. So I spent the first 10 years of my life breeding inbred lines that had multiple disease resistance to them. And to do that I went to collections of all over the world. I had about 2,000 or 3,000 different kinds of Brassicas growing in my greenhouses. And then one beautiful spring morning when the sun was shining in my greenhouse, I looked there and there in among some of these crops that had come from India and Nepal and all over the world I saw some flowering faster, and I said, you know, I wasn't in a bathtub but I had a eureka moment. I said, golly, maybe I could breed a model organism that would flower faster. So that began the quest in the development of the Fast Plant. These are the criteria, the next shot I think will show you, of the criteria that I formed. As a plant breeder we have what we call an ideotype. That's from the Greek or Latin of idea. You have an idea of what you want in your mind, then you select and breed to that. And I needed minimum...

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Rapid seed maturation. So actually pollinate it.

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I think I just don't want to hear myself. Thank you. Is that okay?

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Okay, Tom. Anyway, rapid seed maturation and I want absence of seed dormancy. A crop like this, Brassica nigra, has about 1% of its total viable seeds germinating each year. So it will stay in the soil a hundred years, and when the conditions are just right, it comes up, and you know what we call it? A weed. Yeah because it has that capacity. It's huge evolution strategy of survival among plants to have seed dormancy. But I had to get it out because I want to harvest my seed and plant it quick. So I selected a way for that. I wanted small plants, and I wanted them with high female fertility When I cross them, I get lots of seed. And I then deployed the selection, sort of breeding terminology, but the first 10% of the plants to flower I intermated, just like you did with the bee. I didn't have a bee in those days. I hadn't invented the bee stick yet. But we used camel hair brushes and, believe me, they're not as nice as bees. And then I did that repeatedly. I saved the seed from those repeatedly, and what happened is they got going faster and faster and faster, and then they slowed off and plateaued. So 50% of the flower of a plant flowered in two days, then I said that's good. I tried to keep the populations large so in the hundreds. So I've got lots of genetic mixing among the other traits besides the flower traits. And this is what I was able to do in about three to four years. So that slide's there. Here we go. So for each of the six species that are interrelated, I decided to do that with, and here they are. And rapa, this is the number of days that they now flower in. Instead of years, this is the days for the cycle and now the number of generations I can do per year. So this represented a vast rapid increase. And they were all very small. So I didn't really need the greenhouses. There was all kinds of interesting advantage. I was growing most of this in my office in Russell Labs, named after Harry Russell. But as you can see, this begins to become a very powerful tool in the hands for genetic purposes. So here's just a living graph of Fast Plants at days after seeding in little tiny cells in 10 cubic centimeters of soil. So they grow in very little soil, and here's eight days. At 12 days, they're starting to show flowering. In 16 days, they're in full flower, and at 20 days, they're setting seed. At 20 more days, I'm harvesting the seed ready to go back in the ground. The plants you have in your hand are 16 days old today. So that became my research tool for exploring the genetic basis for multiple disease resistance across the various species and to begin to transmit them into other stocks. That really launched what we call the Fast Plant Program. And we want to just sort of wrap this whole lecture up by telling you about the Fast Plant. So this is sort of the background, the Wisconsin background. But in 1973 I just began that, and by about 1978 I had pretty fast cycling Brassicas. And then I told my grad students you better put on your jogging shoes from now on. No more boots. We're going to have to really move. And you can do that with this thing. But what I was also doing at the same time was saying, you know, I was teaching in a wonderful curriculum on this campus called the Biocore, and I started to use my plants in the Biocore curriculum, and I found that they were very effective for students. They could plant a seed, watch a plant grow, take data on it, experiment with those plants, and do all sorts of fun things with them. So I shared that seed with some colleagues at Cornell and University of California Davis, and they found the same thing and they were very happy to get the seed. Then I said, you know, about 1982-1983, I said if we could get living plants into the curriculum for our students at the pre-college level, this would be really interesting. And so one day I called in my wife, Coe, who is here tonight, right there, Coe, and her job share partner Jane Scharer, who were sort of widow moms at West High. They'd finally flushed out the last of their progeny to the university, and they were wondering what to do with their lives. And so I said I think I've got a job for you. Help me write a grant to the National Science Foundation. And sure enough, they did. So every day for quite a few months we sat down and Jane and Coe wrote the grant and out of that was spawned the Wisconsin Fast Plant Program. So Jane and Coe then took the plants that we were developing, we hired, of course, on those grants high school teachers to tell us what they needed because the one thing I had learned as a cabbage breeder and a Brassica breeder was you have to know your constituency if you're producing a product. That's just old fashioned marketing. And so our product was teachers. And at that point, my teaching changed too because we were in schools, Coe and Jane were in schools all over the United States and following up the next year to see how it went and so on. In fact, our evaluator on that first grant was a woman from Simmons College in Boston who decided she would adopt those and write her PhD on the effectiveness of live plants in the curriculum. So that didn't hurt us either to have a PhD produced instantly on the model. So we had the model plant that was both useful as an educational program. And what we have here today is Hedi, who is a PhD in education from this university and a former high school teacher and writer of curriculum across the country, as the director of the Wisconsin Fast Plant Program. Am I ever lucky. Are we ever lucky because she's part of the Wisconsin legacy. So what we needed, though, was the essential drivers in this program. So we had a good curriculum and we began to publish manuals. All kinds of books and manuals went out, and other parts of the world noticed these and asked if they could translate them. So there are the Fast Plant manuals in many versions are translated into Spanish, into Portuguese, into Chinese and Japanese and Korean even. There are many of these manuals, like this one, I can't even read. It's a perfect facsimile in Korean. So those were interesting days. And pretty much we're able to be continuously funded through various government agency foundations and charitable foundations if you like or endowed foundations, like the Kellogg Foundation, because we were bringing new hands-on science. Just like you did here today, kids go in and plant a seed, and we'll say more about that in a minute. But in any event, the important thing was how can you maintain the seed? Remember, this is a curriculum and then there's the seed that goes with it. And we are very fortunate here at the University of Wisconsin to have the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. So, very soon after the program began to grow well with the instructional materials that were developed by teachers for teachers, we went to WARF and they were pretty reluctant. They said, geez, we don't patent stuff like that. But we sort of made a convincing case that the instructional materials might be useful. And lo and behold, they got a patent on it for us, for themselves, for the university. So those patents ran out after 17 years and they've trademarked because it's been so useful for the program So that's the bolts, but it's a partnership that Harry Steenbock set up many, many years ago when he established the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which is one of the reasons we're in this building. A lot of WARF money has gone into all sorts of the structures around us here. And incidentally, I came here with Glen Pound, and this makes me feel pretty good, on a WARF fellowship. So that money is, I hope I'm repaying it. Anyway, the Fast Plant Program has been underway. Coe and Jane ran that program for many years until Coe went on to greater things, and Jane went on to greater things. And Hedi and Dan Lauffer have picked it up. But the key to this thing is also in the seed. And so we've established the rapid cycling Brassica collection. And Jackson here, our friend, is the curator of that. Now, I want to just take, there are many, many stories we could tell you, but there's one kind of fun story that relates to the plant that you have. And so we're going to talk about the Astro-Plants. So one of the things that I was doing was always looking for variation in this population, the thousands and thousands. You realize that all of these plants that are among you today, all of them, including these here, were grown in one shoebox. That was a shoebox I bought from Target. It cost me $.99. So these are low cost things as part of the bottle biology program which was a spinoff of Fast Plants. Going into schools where the budget for an elementary kid across this country, in science for elementary schools when we started was $.57 per kid per year for science. Just think about that. So anyway, we wanted low cost bottle recyclable sort of things, and that's what bottle biology is. So this is where we're heading with it. But in any event, I was walking just outside this building, actually, one afternoon and I met my professor Ted Tibbitts, who's a friend who is a potato specialist in horticulture, and he'd been actively working on potatoes in space to get them up there, and there were some corn men working on it, and I just casually said, well, Ted, that's a big plant to put up in space, isn't it? How much does it cost? And he said it costs millions of dollars a pound of lift to get that into, this was shuttle. This was before space station. One of the things that was happening that Ted didn't know about but we knew was the Wisconsin Fast Plants were being used by scientists as research tools all over the world, it turned out. And there was a professor, Mary Musgrave, at Louisiana State University who was a plant physiologist, was using these in her research with the Russians before the wall came down, and the Russians were Wisconsin Fast Plant seed in experiments. I was now a scientist at the University of Wisconsin during the 1980s and 1990s who decided that he would say any time somebody asked me from the world of education, would I do something? I said yes. Let's see how many times. So I was like a Washington shuttle. Every two weeks I was in Washington, DC, with one federal agency or another as the friendly plant scientist guy. But these meetings, if you've ever been to Washington and been in some of the meetings, they get so boring. And I'd sit around and listen to everybody talk, talk, talk, talk. So I decided that out of one of these little genetic stalks, I had a little dwarf, little petite thing, I was going to put that into a cake pan that would fit under the seat in front of me of Northwest Orient Airlines and then Midwest Express so I could get it in. This is before 9/11 when I could just carry on this cake pan full of plants that were growing in bottle caps. And when the meeting got kind of dull, I would just quietly pull this cake pan out with about a hundred plants in it and a bee stick and say how would you guys like to pollinate some plants?

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And they loved it. And I said, well, we've got a meeting a month and a half from now, I'll bring back your children. And so they started waiting for me to bring back their children. This was my Washington shuttle stock that I happened to have the day I met Professor Tibbitts in my back pocket. And I said, you know, Ted, I've got some seed in my pocket I think you might be interested in. Go take this to Washington and see if they would like to grow a really small plant and see if it would work in the space program. Within a week, Washington called me, NASA called me and said you're on our team. And that was how it happened. Well, it was only about two years later, again more shuttling into NASA now and all these other agencies, it was about, yeah, it was a short time when my phone rang, 1996 I think it was. Mary Musgrave from LSU on the phone saying, Paul, the SALT agreements, the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreements are now, the wall is down and Ukrainians are desirous, the Ukrainian scientists are desirous of using your plants, and they are negotiating with the State Department to de-emphasize the mobile rocket launchers which the Soviet Union had because their chief engineer on those was a man named Kuchma. Well lo and behold, Kuchma became the president of Ukraine. And so we want flights on shuttles. That was their negotiating. And as part of that, just as a sideline, it was part of that great agreement that we're agonizing about now as to what to do in Ukraine. I mean the State Department is because they signed a lot of things that say we're going to help you, and they haven't necessarily helped them. That's an aside. But at the moment, Mary said sketch out a program And I said how about a hundred thousand American kids and a hundred thousand Ukrainian kids. They're going to put your plants up in space, and the question is, will plants be capable of producing seed in microgravity? Will a sperm meet an egg in microgravity? We didn't know. So sure. And so we designed an experiment called --. And it was a wonderful project, and I spent time in Ukraine talking to teachers simultaneous translation, and out of that we produced, the program produced this booklet. Well, when NASA does something in education, they do it in a small way. They printed 65,000 copies of this in English and distributed every last one. Ukrainians, there it is. If you can read Russian or Ukrainian, it's in that same facsimile in Ukrainian. They then taught Colonel Kadenyuk how to pollinate in microgravity. They then brought over 10 kids and their teachers to watch the launch. And Colonel Kadenyuk went up a colonel and came down a general.

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And Kuchma, the president, was there at the same time. So Dan Lauffer and I were down there for that and had some very interesting. Coe was involved in teaching our team, and it was just a moment in time and space that was one of the many, many kinds of stories we could tell you about. So here are the plants actually in the shuttle, in microgravity. Here's the logo, and look at the Fast Plants coming out of the mid-deck lockers, etc. Well, that was just the beginning of a saga with NASA and Fast Plants. So these have been on the International Space Station and so forth. So this is a timely thing, and I thought you guys would have fun pollinating Fast Plants. How much time left? Okay, so let's just leave it there in space. And I want to wrap it up here this evening with really some commentary on the genetics because if you still raise the question, how on Earth can this be Brassica oleracea and this be Brassica oleracea and this be Brassica oleracea and this and this and all that diversity, and how can this be Brassica rapa, like this? Oh, by the way, this is Brassica rapa. This has been out of my refrigerator. This is an American purple top turnip. You see the turnip? In a bottle growing system. Let's just show you guys how easy it is to grow these. You want to go get a vegetable and eat a turnip, okay, but it's much more fun to grow a turnip.

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And look at its flowers. So how could the plant around in front of you be the same species as this, as this, as this, as this oil? It all has to do with allelic variation. Now, allelic is a term that geneticists use. It's our genetic variation. Variation within the gene itself. Well, my friend, Professor Maxwell, who's sitting right over here, is a man who's a genetic guy. He looks at the genes. He's a tomato breeder, not a Brassica breeder. But he keeps up on that literature, and he sent me this paper about two, three weeks ago, which he said, you know, Paul, it'd be interesting to just show the group. And I thought, gee, it was, Doug. Here is a group of Japanese scientists who have cloned the candidate gene conferring fusarium yellows resistance in Brassica oleracea. This January this paper came out in a highly sophisticated genetic journal, and there's Professor Jones pulling the very plant in 1910. So isn't that cool? That's what I think is what it's all about. So this how you bring genetics, and this is Professor Walker as a student, as an undergraduate, no as a graduate student in this case, in the greenhouse pollinating Professor Jones's cabbages. So keep the camera going, and there is a story to tell. So I think the next slide really is one that I want to just give you the essence of what this Wisconsin Fast Plant Program is all about. It's really about teaching the child within all of us, the curiosity that is stifled continuously by a conventional educational system that is broke that we need to think looking at. It's the power of a living seed that when a child within us, whether you're a real child, whether you're a child within you, I know you are all children because you may not have bodies of children but you wouldn't be here if you weren't a child in spirit. And so our mantra is to know a plant, grow a plant. But the final thing I want to really say is that we live on a green planet and our future depends on green and green is not like all the building green stuff we hear about, all the green stuff. The green is photosynthesis green. It's green plants. And when a child plants a plant, we know this. The power of the Fast Plant is the power of putting a seed in the ground. And I know a lot of you are gardeners. Gardening is the best recreational educational activity you can get. So is a walk in the woods or a walk anywhere when we're listening and communicating. So, what can a plant teach you? The power is in the seed to know a plant, grow a plant. Thank you.

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