Announcer:
Welcome to the Salk Institute’s Where Cures Begin podcast where scientists talk about breakthrough discoveries with your hosts Allie Akmal and Brittany Fair.

Brittany Fair:
I’m here today with Dr. Wolfgang Busch. He is a professor in the plant and molecular and cellular biology laboratory as well as the integrative biology laboratory. He’s also the co-director of the Harnessing Plants Initiative with Salk Professor Joanne Chory. His work focuses on plant roots and how scientists can utilize roots to fight climate change. Welcome to Where Cures Begin Dr. Busch.

Wolfgang Busch:
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Brittany Fair:
Can you tell me about your path that led you to become a research scientist at Salk?

Wolfgang Busch:
Yeah, it has been quite a long path since I started as an undergrad, but I have to commit that I was absolutely not enthusiastic about plant biology. Actually, I had a little party when my last botany class was over to celebrate that. And so I specialized in genetics, biochemistry and microbiology. And I actually, uh, went to do an eight-month research internship at UC San Diego where I joined a lab microbiology lab, that explored the first wave of bioinformatics. And, I needed a job to get some, some money because the time in the U S really depleted me. I started to work in a plant biology lab and there, they studied the environmental response of plants to heat stress. And I was just blown away because I discovered how interesting plants are because they can, they can’t run away, but they can, you know, modulate their, you know, cellular programs to adapt to a lot of situations.

Wolfgang Busch:
And so I really got deeply into that and I decided to drop out of microbiology and become a plant biologist.

Brittany Fair:
Oh wow that’s a dramatic change after a summer job.

Wolfgang Busch:
Absolutely. But in the course of my work, I went to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology to the department in which they studied plant biology, which was headed by Detlef Weigel, who is a Salk alumni. And I discovered that there were actually a lot of opportunities in this area of systems biology to get a truly deep understanding of how organisms work. And so during that time, you know, I went to conferences as a student and I became familiar with a root because the root was an even better system. Roots are very important in that the shape of roots and the growth of roots determines the plants’ fitness to survive. So, I really became a root convert and decided to spend the rest of my scientific life, well I dunno if it’s the rest of my scientific life, but it’s certainly a huge proportion on root biology.

Brittany Fair:
So, what brought you to the Salk Institute?

Wolfgang Busch:
I saw this ad of the integrative biology laboratory from the Salk, which was always in my mind, I mean the Salk, you know, growing up in this plant biology world was one of the best places ever, almost like the Olympus of plant science. And so I thought this, this will be a good place to even, you know, move faster and deeper, no pun intended, with my root research.

Brittany Fair:
When you were here as a student UCSD, did you ever imagine that you might return to work at Salk?

Wolfgang Busch:
No, actually not. I mean, I actually, back then I knew, you know, in academia if you follow an academic path, it’s impossible though to predict by you where you end up because there are only very few drops at the high level, at the professor level. If I would have known back then that I would come back, I’d have been very happy because I really liked San Diego and the climate and the sun and the ocean and the science environment. But I probably wouldn’t have believed it because the odds are like so small.

Brittany Fair:
Yeah. And now you’ve made it and you have your own lab. What are you currently working on?

Wolfgang Busch:
So we continue our work on trying to understand what are the genes that really determine root shapes and their response to the environment and to go beyond this and really identify complex networks of genes that together act to shape root traits. And that is actually surprisingly hard. But actually I think we’re making good progress, uh, progress for this. It is great to be at a place like Salk where it is very, very interdisciplinary. And I can, for instance, talk to neuroscientists when they think about animals making decisions. We can think about roots making decisions without a nervous system or consciousness. But in terms of information theory and computation, they seem to be a lot of similarities.

Brittany Fair:
Are the genes and pathways also similar?

Wolfgang Busch:
Some, there are some very conserved pathways. For instance, the TOR glucose signaling pathway is very conserved and nutrient and glucose signal is also very important in plans for allocating the resources.

Brittany Fair:
Interesting. And for some of our listeners who maybe are into gardening or like plants, I feel like a lot of the time the focus is on the top part of the plant, you know, and what it’s producing be that a fruit or some kind of vegetable output. But maybe we haven’t thought about the root system as much. So why really should be care more about plant roots?

Wolfgang Busch:
Well, without a root, there wouldn’t be a shoot in land plans. So all the good things that the chutes do, like produce vegetables or fruits or other forms of materials are only enabled through the root system because you not only need sunlight and CO2 to make plant material, you also need water and many different nutrients. So, if there wouldn’t be a root, there wouldn’t be a land plant. And interestingly enough, we wouldn’t be here without roots because the Earth’s surface was only colonized because roots evolved. So, animals that eat animals eat animals that eat plants, right. So, plants are at the, at the basis of the food chains. So if you think now about the terrestrial environments, there wouldn’t be land plans without root systems. So there wouldn’t be anything to eat. We wouldn’t have colonized the surface, there wouldn’t be soil without plants.

Wolfgang Busch:
Hmm. So our planet would look very, very different without roots. It would look like Mars with a couple of oceans.

Brittany Fair:
Interesting. It’s crazy to think of that.

Wolfgang Busch:
Yeah, it is right. Roots at the fundament of everything.

Brittany Fair:
Absolutely. And what really inspires you to come to work each day to keep studying roots?

Wolfgang Busch:
Well, there are multiple things that really motivate me. The first is my passion for biology and to truly and deeply understand how biological systems work. And in particular my attention is focused on the root. So uncovering new knowledge brings me great satisfaction, but also it’s all about the people. My lab for instance, I have a very talented students and postdocs and staff in my lab who are incredibly diverse group of people from different cultural backgrounds and who have joined me on the journey to the depth of root biology. And they really inspire me, you know, um, and my colleagues and my other colleagues at Salk, I mean we have a great group of people here.

Wolfgang Busch:
It’s, it’s such a great environment. It’s really fun to come here just for meeting the brilliant people who are around here. And then the last one is really something that has became even more important over the past years is, is the world I truly believe that science and technology have made in the past the world a better place. So I think if you consider the last couple of centuries or millennia, life has been become much better for humans. Right? And I think while not all applications of science are obvious, generally scientific progress, it has the potential to make life better for many, many people and in all organisms on this planet. So I truly believe, you know, if we keep working at science problems, this will make the world a better place for us and the generations to come.

Brittany Fair:
You mentioned earlier that you were working on this big project. So, what is the Harnessing Plants Initiative?

Wolfgang Busch:
So, the Harnessing Plants Initiative is a very bold and ambitious project by the Salk plant biology faculty to try to harness the power of plants to fight climate change. So, the central idea of this is that plants have evolved to do mainly one thing and that is to catch carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to convert it into sugar and to biomaterials. Essentially plants make their own mass and everything we eat and use from plants, uh, out of the thin air by carbon dioxide. No carbon dioxide is at the same time, the molecule that causes global warming and climate change and the climate crisis that’s upcoming. We realized we need to use what we know about plants and we need to use plant genetics to make plants even better to store the carbon dioxide because they are such a powerful agent in the carbon cycle that if we optimize plants a little bit more, that will have a huge impact on the carbon dioxide concentration, the atmosphere.

Wolfgang Busch:
So we are working on multiple aspects. One is focused on the roots, where my lab is providing the expertise and the main effort where we really try to store more carbon in the root. If you have a bigger root system, you have more carbon atoms in the root and they will be trapped in the soil. So that’s good. Yeah. And then if you make the roots deeper, all the carbon in the root system, it gets degraded more slowly. And that’s kind of the key in this whole project. We don’t want to necessarily improve the ability of plants to catch carbon dioxide, but we want to lock it in the soil. If you have deeper roots, carbon dioxide, what could the carbon molecules in the root system get turned over a slower, so more roots, deeper roots, and we’re going to store more carbon in the soil.

Wolfgang Busch:
That will be you there, uh, mid to long time. Okay. Now the third aspect of this is, is to change the chemistry of the root, the natural chemistry to make the carbon that is in the root, uh, to stay longer in the soil. So, to make the plant that resists the composition and our kind of silver bullet for that is suberin, this is the stuff that cork is made of and all plant roots make this naturally. So those are the three big things. More roots, deeper roots, more suberin to increase the ability of plants to store carbon in the soil for long time periods, uh, decades, maybe centuries even.

Brittany Fair:
Oh wow. And what’s kind of the timeline for this project?

Wolfgang Busch:
We were very fortunate to get a major grant from the Ted Audacious Program, and this is a five-years project where we actually can leverage very significant amounts of resources to address this, this problem. Within five years, we really want to have crop prototypes that store much more carbon in the soil and we are focusing on crops because we know if we will use plant-based solutions, we need to work with plants that are used for food to eat because in the next century we’ll be 11 billion people on the planet. We are, these people need food, so if we use crops to store carbon and to produce food at the same time, you basically have solved the two problems at once. It’s, it’s a lot. It’s a very ambitious project but we know we have to be very, very ambitious because time is pressing. Like every year we as humanity emit more carbon dioxide and there is no solution on the horizon that within the next decades or so can make a global impact. So you really have to hurry up to get to a solution very fast and that that is something that we are very aware of. That’s why we are very ambitious and bold.

Brittany Fair:
And you have already made progress actually on this project. Do you want to tell me a little bit about one of your recent publications?

Wolfgang Busch:
Yes. So, I think one of the first breakthroughs in this area is that we have discovered a gene and its natural variants that can confer deeper rooting in our model plant Arabidopsis. But also in this project we have developed technologies that we can now use to massively screen for more. We want to have 50 of these genes to basically being able to try all of these in different crops.

Brittany Fair:
So, are you kind of moving on to identify all these genes at this point?

Wolfgang Busch:
Yes. So, so we just started massive screens to identify a large number of genes that confer deep rooting So within the next months or year, I think we will have a very significant number. So, in the Harnessing Plants Initiative, we target six different row crops that are among the most abundantly planted crops on this planet. It’s corn and soy and rice and wheat and canola and cotton. And so, we’ll work directly in these crop plants to also identify deep rooting genes and also genes that confirm more suberin in the root system. So that’s another big part of this project to, to, to move into these crop plants.

Brittany Fair:
The big question, but do you think it’ll work?

Wolfgang Busch:
Yes, I’m really convinced that then we have a good chance to do this. Plants have the ability to store carbon in the soil via their root system. So, nobody has ever tried to optimize this. As far as I know, we are the very first ones and we have all Salk expertise and knowledge in this area and we can now apply all this towards this one goal.

Brittany Fair:
And you’re, you’re running a lab, you’re trying to fight global climate change. Uh, do you have time for a personal life at all with all of this going on or do you find it just all consuming?

Wolfgang Busch:
You definitely work a lot as a scientist if you lead a lab, but there’s always needs to be time for a work life balance. And I have found that, at least for me, it’s something very important because in order to be very innovative, um, and creative, uh, if you always think about the same thing 24 hours per day, it’s very hard to get like a really good and different idea. I need some time to switch off my brain from science to be able to have then like this wonderful idea of an experiment of a new technology that I then can implement and follow on. And I think for this work life balance is actually very, very important. I actually did, uh, did an experiment when I was a PhD student with myself.

Brittany Fair:
I don’t know if that counts as being off the clock if you’re actively running an experiment.

Wolfgang Busch:
No, no, no. Okay. Okay. Let’s say a data analysis. I conducted a data analysis, so there was a time when my wife, she’s from Mexico originally go back visit her parents for a couple of weeks. So I basically had a lot of time to spend in the lab, but I basically worked I think 16 to 18 hours in the lab and just like went home like for brief sleep. And then at one point after like having like two of these periods over the, over like a year, I, I basically analyzed my lab book where I basically noted, you know, my, my experiments and what worked. And so, so I found like in the, initially my productivity increased but it decreased after working too long, you know, if there’s this very hard load. So, so I think, uh, I mean everyone’s different, but I think it is important to have a work life balance.

Brittany Fair:
And kind of a fun question I like to ask people, if you woke up tomorrow and you will no longer allowed to be a scientist, what was kind of your backup plan? What would you do?

Wolfgang Busch:
All right. So, I think, it’s kind of funny because it was actually the choice that I had in, in high school when I thought about what kind of subject do I want to study? So, I was like, really, I was certain it was biology, but I was like tempted to, uh, either study political science or like for like at a film school. So I like creativity, so, and I like movies. So a movie director would also be a great choice.

Brittany Fair:
Hmm. Do you think you can direct a good movie about plants?

Wolfgang Busch:
Well, I have to say I’m probably the biggest producer of root movies in the world because we always do time lapse imaging and we have a very, very powerful screening platform. So I don’t think there’s any lab that has more like little root movie clips. Uh, but yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I, I’m not sure. I think I could direct a movie about plants, but I probably more interested like in a real, like in a, in a kind of a Hollywood style movie.

Brittany Fair:
Um, and do you have any advice for aspiring plant biologists?

Wolfgang Busch:
The most important advice I’d give is follow your passions. Be bold and visionary, but be smart about it. I think science is one of the few careers where you can have like a very, very large degree of intellectual independence. And if you enjoy this like a great amount of intellectual satisfaction, right? You have also the ability to move between countries and cultures and to work with people of all kinds of different backgrounds with all kinds of different stories and languages. So, so that can be very inspiring and satisfactory if you’re into this. Being a scientist is a great thing. And, and also because you can work on the stuff you are really passionate about.

Brittany Fair:
Sure. And what do you think the future holds for this field?

Wolfgang Busch:
I think we will increase our understanding how plants see the world, how they respond and how they will respond to a future environment. How do we actually grow plants that can provide the food feed and fiber for 11 billion people. And that’s plant biology, right? And the other one is the climate crisis where um, plans as the central agent in the carbon cycle can play a tremendous role in pulling down the carbon from the atmosphere to counteract global warming and climate change. And why this is very obvious to a few people. It. I think plant scientists must convince themselves and then the world that it has to be a major effort in this field, way more funding to basically use plants as our allies to make the world a better place.

Brittany Fair:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I feel so enlightened not only about plants, but roots, something I didn’t know a ton about, so I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with us. Thank you again.

Wolfgang Busch:
You’re welcome. It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Announcer:
Join us next time for more cutting-edge Salk science. At Salk world-renowned scientists work together to explore big, bold ideas from cancer to Alzheimer’s, aging to climate change. Where Cures Begin is a production of the Salk Institute’s Office of Communications. To learn more about the research discussed today, visit Salk dot EDU slash podcast.