Botanist takes hints from plants to learn more about human biology

It’s always springtime in Edgar Spalding’s laboratory, where shelves of the small flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana sprout year-round under carefully timed lights and climate control. Often underappreciated, plants hold many clues to general and even human biology, Spalding says. Take, for example, his surprising discovery in Arabidopsis of “thinking genes” best known for their critical roles in our brains and nervous systems.

A professor in the botany department, Spalding studies the physiological, genetic and molecular forces at work as the tiny embryo in a seed grows into a seedling. You might find him hard at work literally watching plants grow — with the help of computers and digital cameras — to understand how light and other factors guide seedling growth and development.

Wisconsin Week: How did you get interested in plants?

Spalding: I grew up on a subsistence farm in rural Nova Scotia and was parented in ways that encouraged a deep interest in nature, so taking biology in college was a natural choice. There, I had a course from a professor who liked to talk about how seedlings perceived light signals, and I got hooked on the precise, physical nature of photobiology. Also, I irreverently enjoyed not being interested in medical school, so plants it was!

Wisconsin Week: What do you enjoy most about your work?

Edgar Spalding: I enjoy explaining things when I can, whether in the classroom or in print. I enjoy the variety that comes with running a research lab — no two days are alike, for better or for worse. Most of all, I enjoy working every day with the students and postdocs in my lab who do terrific experiments that give us and people around the world lots to think about.

Wisconsin Week: What about your field do you think surprises people the most?

Edgar Spalding: Two types of genes in the popular model organism we work with (the otherwise-useless weed Arabidopsis) are best known for their important roles in humans: glutamate receptors for their roles in higher cognitive functions of the brain, and multidrug resistance transporters for their impacts on cancer therapies. People unfamiliar with plant biology are often surprised to learn that molecules with ‘human identities’ (because of their most typical informational context) also exist in plants, and for a reason.

Wisconsin Week: What outcomes do you see from your work for society?

Edgar Spalding: Plants offer some experimental expediencies that could be exploited to empower studies of human health. I would be pleased, and not surprised, if our work on the fundamentals of glutamate receptors and multidrug resistance transporters in plants spawned a new means of screening for drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. I believe we will understand the human better, by better understanding nature!

Wisconsin Week: What’s the coolest thing you’ve learned?

Edgar Spalding: The coolest thing I’ve learned is that understanding in various fields — whether poetry, high-throughput computing, or seedling development — is achieved by human processes that are fundamentally more alike than different.