- My name is Neil Robbins, I got my PJD from Stanford University in biology. 
- I was in the lab of Jose Dinneny, studying plant biology. So specifically 
- I was tryna understand how plants sense and respond to water in their environment. 
So specifically looking at how the root system responds to that environmental signal. 
What brought me into the project I was working on in Jose's lab. So, I guess pretty broadly, 
I was interested in plant biology and more specifically, I was interested in how plants 
sense and respond to their environment. 

You know, because growing up in the desert, I kind of understood pretty well first-hand 
what happens when you don't have enough water, right. Knowing how plants can find that 
resource in their environment is really important to having a stable food supply. 

And when I first met Jose Dinneny, my PI, I really wanted to try to understand how the 
plant root system decides where it's going to position its lateral branches. 
So just like if you think of a shoot or like above ground tissues of a plant, 
you know, it's not just one long stem. It grows and sort of forms this branch 
network over time. And as that's happening above ground, the same thing is happening 
below ground with the root system. As the root navigates through the soil, 
it's gonna be producing more branches as it sorta goes down. Why does it even 
matter how the root is positioning its branches? Like, why does it matter that 
the root grows in a particular direction in order to enhance its growth? 

So that kinda gets at a kinda misconception that might exist about what soil is like. 
It's not just one big block of dirt that has all the water and nutrients that the plant 
needs. So if you think like microscopically if you zoom in, soil is actually a 
pretty complicated network of solid particles that are gonna form like different patches, 
little pockets of air in some areas, some pockets have more water, some pockets might 
have more nutrients, some areas might have, you know, salts or things that are toxic to 
the plant. So as this little root is navigating through the soil, it's gonna encounter a 
lot of this like uneven distribution of all these different signals and resources that 
it'll need. That's kinda why it's pretty important that the root be aware of its 
environment and able to kind of direct its growth and development to avoid, you know, 
hazardous areas and move toward areas that are more beneficial for the plant. 

And in Jose's lab, I and others were really interested in understanding what 
environmental factors influence where the root system is going to grow and 
expand this branched network. So we had this growth setup that we were using to 
study the roots and we found that there was a specific environmental factor that 
seemed really attractive to the root. So it induced lots of branching of the root 
system into one direction. And I really wanted to understand what it was about that 
environment that was leading to this attraction of the root system. And through a 
number of experiments, we found that water was kinda the critical environmental signal 
that was leading to this expansion of the root system.