A Harvesting Team

This week Dr. Ivan Baxter, USDA research scientist and assistant member at the Danforth Center along with his lab completed a large harvest of samples for root RNA in the Center’s state-of-the-art Plant Growth Facility.

“Since RNA levels are very dynamic, we need to harvest all the samples as close to the same time as we can and get them into liquid nitrogen as soon as possible to preserve them,” said Dr. Ivan Baxter. “The entire lab assisted in this large project including Danforth Center’s 2013 summer interns assigned to my lab.”

The Baxter lab was able to harvest more than 400 samples in three hours.  The population the lab is researching is derived from a cross between two very diverse maize lines. The lab will then utilize robotics at the Center to create libraries for sequencing.

The Baxter lab is interested in understanding how plants regulate the mobilization, uptake, translocation, and storage of elements in different environments. They focus their efforts on the seeds of corn and soybeans, the two most commonly grown crops in the United States.

The seeds are important not only as the component of the plant that gets used for food, but also as a summary tissue of many physiological processes that are important for plant growth. They also study model systems to understand basic processes and apply this knowledge to the crop plants.

The Danforth Center’s Summer Internship program, funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site award, supports research training for undergraduate students for 11 weeks.

The program gives students the opportunity to participate in a world-class research environment in the area of plant and life sciences to obtain valuable research skills. In 2012 the Danforth Center expanded its program, raising the total number of students trained through the program to 73. Learn more about our Internship program here.

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