Talent Vharachumu was an undergraduate intern who is originally from Zimbabwe and attends university in Costa Rica. She is studying agricultural sciences and has become particularly interested in plant physiology, especially due to her time at the lab. Along with the work Talent did for the physiology lab, as is typical for an intern, she sometimes participated in work with other labs as well. She enjoyed this because it allowed her to learn many different things and meet more people. She hopes to be able to return to the lab to complete her masters. 

She enjoyed her work at the lab because she learned more about plant physiology. Our goal at the tree physiology lab is to improve general tree health and make strides in understanding tree physiology better and more completely. To accomplish this goal, we do research with a whole plant approach. One such experiment is on how different plants respond to and are affected by heat.  

 

Talent primarily worked on that experiment. She would collect leaves from a variety of trees in a variety of genotypes and perform a procedure on them to test how they tolerate the different temperatures. To do the experiment she used a machine that punches a piece of the leaf out, then placed the piece on a black disk that went inside a Ziplock bag, which was then placed in a container of water for 30 minutes. Then she’d record the chlorophyll fluorescence (photosynthetic energy conversion) of the leaves, given from a machine called the Fluoremeter. She also worked on another project with an infrared gas analyzer (Li-6800) machine to measure photosynthesis, gas exchange, and chlorophyll fluorescence. 

When I asked Talent why she believes this work is important and why she thinks people should care about it she explained that the data she’s gathering helps us better understand the way climate change is affecting the planet, different environments, and plants in general. People who work in agriculture can use the data about which plants tolerate heat better to determine which genotypes to grow, which hopefully will increase plant yield and agricultural efficiency as temperatures warm. Talent also said it “…can help them reduce losses from low production due to high temperatures that are being caused by global warming.” This is useful because it allows growers to make informed decisions about what kinds of crops to plant as the climate and planet continue to change. I asked specifically what she would say to people who think they don’t have a reason to care about plants and she said, “They don’t care about plants, but they care about eating.”