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<h1 style="display:block;margin:0px;padding:0px;color:rgb(3,61,221);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:40px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:150%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(75,0,130)"><strong><span style="font-size:24px">The Plants3D NRT Program Newsletter</span></strong></span></h1>
<div style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(255,165,0)">July 2021</span></div>
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<h1 style="text-align:center;display:block;margin:0px;padding:0px;color:rgb(3,61,221);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:40px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:150%;letter-spacing:normal"><span style="color:rgb(75,0,130)"><span style="font-size:20px"><strong>Announcements</strong></span></span></h1>
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<li style="text-align:justify"><font color="#000000">Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science workshop "the essentials online": Friday 17 September 2021 from 10 am - 1:00 pm</font></li>
<li style="text-align:justify"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">Community Member Highlight: Dr. Robert Jinkerson and Ph.D. candidate Marcus Harland-Dunaway.</span></li>
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<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:18px">"Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science workshop - The Essentials."</span></div>
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As scientists, we are used to communicating science among our peers and other scientists. Most of us do an amazing job. But, have you ever struggled to communicate your work to an undergrad or someone who is not a scientist, such as your grandparents, friends from high school, or maybe just a random person you met on a long flight?<br>
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Let's be honest, we use a lot of jargon and technical details when we try to communicate our work. However, most people are unfamiliar with these terms, and their eyes glaze over. <br>
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The Plants3D program is excited that our Plants3D trainees will get the opportunity to learn how to properly communicate science during the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science workshop "the essentials online" on Friday, September 17th, from 10 am - 1:00 pm. <br>
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Please note that this workshop is limited to 16 trainees and that first come, first served counts when registering for this workshop. For more information about the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, please visit <a href="https://ucr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=20258b97443c8dea22c17955f&id=95a55c4b74&e=f8eca9c9de" style="color:rgb(0,126,158);font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">https://aldacenter.org/index.php</a>. Contact Maureen if you have not expressed your interest.</div>
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<h1 style="text-align:center;display:block;margin:0px;padding:0px;color:rgb(3,61,221);font-family:Helvetica;font-size:40px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:150%;letter-spacing:normal"><span style="color:rgb(75,0,130)"><span style="font-size:20px">Plants3D Community Profile</span></span></h1>
<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:20px"><strong>Dr. Robert Jinkerson and<br>
Ph.D. candidate Marcus Harland-Dunaway</strong></span></div>
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<div style="text-align:justify">Professor Jinkerson’s research program is broadly interested in photosynthetic organisms - plants and algae. These organisms have huge agricultural, economic, and environmental importance. His research aims to make fundamental discoveries about the biology of these organisms and then use this knowledge to engineer solutions to problems in the fields of food, energy, and the environment.<br>
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Dr. Jinkerson’s unique academic background draws on graduate and postdoctoral training in biological engineering at the University of Missouri, applied chemistry at Colorado School of Mines, and plant biology at the Carnegie Institution/Stanford. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and a cooperating faculty in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences.<br>
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A main goal of Jinkerson's lab is to engineer plants for controlled environment agriculture – for example, farming in urban areas, vertical structures, shipping containers, or even spacecrafts. To thrive in these non-traditional environments, plants must overcome challenges such as limited physical space, artificial lighting, and unique growth substrates. The lab applies the latest advances in genome engineering and synthetic biology to engineer plants for these environments.<br>
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Urban agriculture offers many benefits for food production, including land use efficiency, resource use efficiencies, lower environmental impacts, shorter supply chains, and production independent of the weather, pests, or seasons; however, it often has higher costs relative to traditional farming and is limited to only a few crops. <br>
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<strong>SPACE Tomatoes</strong><br>
Recently, in collaboration with Dr. Martha Orozco, Director of the UCR Plant Transformation Facility, the lab has studied an extremely dwarf tomato created using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, now called the SPACE (Small Plants for Agriculture Controlled Environments) tomato. The SPACE tomato shows promise for providing fresh vegetables during long-term space travel and in urban areas grown in vertical structures. As a result of progress in this area, Dr. Jinkerson was <a href="https://ucr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=20258b97443c8dea22c17955f&id=926407433d&e=f8eca9c9de" style="color:rgb(0,126,158);font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">awarded the FFAR New Innovator Award</a> to help support him and his lab to engineer larger, tastier varieties of tomatoes to be better suited for controlled environment agriculture and begin engineering other crops such as peppers, potatoes, and lettuce for growth in similarly challenging environments.<br>
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This work has also been awarded a NASA Space Biology grant to evaluate the SPACE tomatoes for growth in NASA’s Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) on the International Space Station (ISS). This experiment aims to determine how well the tomatoes grow in microgravity and perform a “seed to seed” experiment in which astronauts will harvest seeds from the tomatoes and grow a new generation of SPACE tomatoes on the ISS to complete the plant life cycle.<br>
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<strong>Plants3D fellow Marcus Harland-Dunaway’s perspective on working in a Chemical and Environmental Engineering lab and how Plants3D is connected to his Ph.D. research.</strong><br>
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I was always interested in application-driven research, and that is certainly a focus in our lab. Dr. Jinkerson has a lot of experience in biological systems and chemical engineering, so I feel like I have received plenty of guidance on thinking about biological research and experimental methods. Still, I have also gained a lot of new perspectives. <em>I have definitely built up an engineering mindset while working in the lab.</em> I always think about the simplest, most efficient means to answer a question or design an experiment. The focus always comes back to how the approach moves us towards an application or gives us the most information for the effort that I put into it. I have also received a lot of exposure to interdisciplinary ideas and technologies; for example, we collaborated with a chemical engineering lab at the University of Delaware with an electrolysis system that could efficiently produce acetate. We worked with them to incorporate this system with biology and produce an artificial photosynthetic system for food production, which we are currently working on publishing. This collaboration has led to current lines of research for me in the lab, which has even overlapped with the Plants3D program.<br>
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As I said, I am interested in application-driven research, so the Plants3D program was perfect for getting more experience thinking about research in the context of an overarching application that is scalable and profitable. It also introduced some engineering concepts that help quantify the feasibility of research ideas and whether they could be a worthwhile business venture. I was able to take the acetate project I was working on in the lab with plants and reapply it in the Plants3D course to yeast. With the help of two engineering PhDs students in Plants3D with experience working with yeast (<strong>Sarah Thorwall </strong>and <strong>Nick Robertson</strong>), we developed a feasible project. We were awarded seed funding for early exploration through the <strong>Plants3D 2020 Design Tournament</strong>. Overall, the program perfectly fits my goals and interests, taught me how to think about research for business applications, and helped me make new connections and collaborations at UCR. I would recommend it to anyone, even if they were not thinking about pursuing a career in biotech or industry.</div>
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<p style="text-align:center;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-size:16px;margin:10px 0px;padding:0px;font-family:Helvetica;line-height:150%"><span style="font-size:11px">On the <span style="text-align:center">left,</span><span style="text-align:center"> </span>Dr. Robert Jinkerson<span style="text-align:center"> and the right Marcus Harland-Dunaway.</span></span></p>
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<div style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:20px"><span style="color:rgb(128,0,128)"><strong>Trainee Information and Tips</strong></span></span></div>
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Do you want your research or outreach to be featured on our website or in a newsletter? Do you want changes in your bio? Do you have an idea for the community to share? Do you want to feature your PI or a new paper? <br>
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Please email the Plants3D NRT Program Coordinator, Maureen Hummel, about your accomplishments with "Plants3D product" as your subject.<br>
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Be sure to acknowledge your NSF funding on every abstract, poster, and manuscript as follows:<br>
"Funded by the US National Science Foundation, DBI-1922642".<br>
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<strong>Program Contacts</strong><br>
Julia Bailey-Serres,<br>
University Distinguished Professor,<br>
Botany and Plant Sciences<br>
<a href="mailto:serres@ucr.edu" style="color:rgb(0,126,158);font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">serres@ucr.edu</a><br>
*<br>
Ian Wheeldon,<br>
Professor,<br>
Chemical and Environmental Engineering <br>
<a href="mailto:Ian.wheeldon@ucr.edu" style="color:rgb(0,126,158);font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">Ian.wheeldon@ucr.edu</a><br>
*<br>
Maureen Hummel,<br>
Program Coordinator <br>
<a href="mailto:maureenh@ucr.edu" style="color:rgb(0,126,158);font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">maureenh@ucr.edu</a></div>
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