Yellowed Pages and Leaves

"You can see the pages are almost yellow" were the first words out of Dr. Zilinskas' mouth. When I sat down across from her, she was already light years ahead of me in her story, but with a jolt she rewinded. Her story began in the late 80's, when she received a grant to conduct research, as most scientific discovery stories begin.

This was around the time a key discovery in the plant pathology world was made: the discovery of abiotic factors. Abiotic, or non-biotic factors, are the environmental factors that influence a plant. One such abiotic factor is ozone. When a plant is exposed to ozone, it causes damage in the leaves that closely resembles the damage caused by plant pathogens. Upon dissection of these “diseased” plants, however, no pathogen could be found. The discovery that this leaf damage was in fact caused by abiotic factors opened up a whole new field in plant pathology.

The next step was to uncover how these abiotic factors achieved their effect in plants. At the time, a drug by the name of EDU was found to completely prevent ozone damage in leaves, yet no one understood why or how. Dr. Zilinskas hoped that by understanding how EDU worked, she could uncover how ozone works. No matter how hard she tried, however, she could not seem to discover the mechanism. Along the way, though, she was able to rule out various options, which ultimately narrowed her newest hypothesis. She will now be using modern sequencing technologies to test her latest hypothesis.