Alizée Malnoë ascends a spiral staircase to Myers Hall’s fourth floor “greenhouse,” one lacking windows. Just within stands metal shelving, housing trays of seedlings haloed by grow lights.
She excitedly opens the door to a double-wide fridge. The artificial light spills into the room, revealing several species of flowering stalks, creeping vines and low-growing leaflets.
“Sometimes people think plant science is botany, but I don’t know much of that,” Malnoë said. “Research in the lab is a lot of making smoothies, like taking a blender, putting leaves and grinding them up to take out the protein inside the leaf and study their composition, their function.”
The Malnoë Lab, Malnoë’s five-person research group, wants to understand how nature works, starting at the forest floor with plants: the ultimate source of energy for all organisms, including humans. To do so, they study Arabidopsis thaliana, a small, flowering plant in the mustard family, for its small, fully sequenced genome and relatively fast growth rate — ideal for plant research.
“I think initially I wanted to make life eternal,” Malnoë, associate professor of biology and principal investigator of the lab, said.
Now, after completing a bachelor’s in agronomical sciences, master’s in plant biology and doctorate in biology, she has settled for leading a research lab that strives to decode the process of photosynthesis, on which Mother Nature runs.
“If we can understand that and tweak, you know, manipulate it to optimize it, then we can make more biomass, or we can better protect the plants in the face of climate change, like drought, flooding, big changes in temperature, cold or heat, and high light intensity,” Malnoë said.
This is what Malnoë, postdoctoral researcher Vera Sham and lab manager Pierrick Bru want to decipher.
A day in the life of a researcher
For the Malnoë Lab, a typical day looks a little something like the following: performing experiments, exchanging ideas with fellow researchers, writing proposals for funding, meeting with their cohorts, responding to emails and planning ensuing days of research.
“When we figure something out as a team, when you’ve been working really hard and really long and do many experiments that failed and then finally you crack it, you know, you feel like you understood something about nature,” Malnoë said. “That’s an amazing feeling. It’s almost like a little investigation.”
Just like detectives stumped by a cold case, both Bru and Sham said failed experiments were the lows of the job.
Luckily, each found their silver linings.
“When I’m working on my experiments, you can even see me sometimes giggle when I make a mistake or when I find something I’m almost about to do is stupid, then I realize, ‘Oh, Vera that’s stupid, do it the other way’,” Sham said.
She emphasizes the innate joy of simply working at her lab bench. Likewise, Bru notes the rush of energy that an unexpected result gives him to continue.
A crash course in the photosynthesis conundrum
Plants make up around 82% of Earth’s biomass, compared to animals’ meager 0.36%. They feed us, feed our cattle, clothe us, house us, run our cars and even recycle the carbon dioxide we breathe out into oxygen we can breathe in.
Plant cells, which contain chloroplasts that host the photosynthesis reaction, absorb sunlight for plants’ use and reflect green light into our eyes.
“So, the big question in the field is how does the plant do that?” Malnoë said. “How does it know to harvest when the light is low in intensity and to dissipate it when there is too much? How does it not get sunburnt? They cannot put sunscreen on, so what do they do?”
How did these researchers get where they are now?
Before they were writing manuscripts for original research at the top of the ladder, each of the lab members started at the bottom rung: undergraduate students.
“As an undergraduate student I wanted to save the world, and I thought making biofuel with algae was maybe a good idea,” Malnoë said, “then I quickly realized that we don’t know enough about basic science in order to optimize it.”
Bru’s epiphany came from seeing his sister study biotechnology, which inspired him to follow her path in the lab. When he started to do science, he knew it would be with plants.
Similarly, Sham developed a passion for agriculture from childhood while growing up in Africa. As a kid, she was fascinated by how her family’s crops adapted well when she planted seeds in different positions. Later, while she was an undergraduate student, she committed to plant sciences after noticing, worriedly, how much the world depends on agriculture versus how little developed the related infrastructure was.
Now, as a team, these three researchers have homed in on how plants use energy and protect themselves both by the process of photosynthesis. Understanding this mechanism provides the necessary tools for the bioengineering of staple crops to make more food, more efficiently.
Just as any career, research has its ups and downs; yet, like Bru, Malnoë cites her passion as a driving force.
“You know being a woman, having a family, having a child, it's possible. Of course it’s a challenge,” she said. “For me, I was scared to have a child. This career is very demanding, so it never feels like the right time. But people are supportive and it's possible to have balance, to have hobbies, not forget your families and friends, but it’s a passion too.”
Now, as far as these researchers have come, their dreams coalesce into one: working this magic on plants for the plants themselves and for the rest of us, too.
