- The goal was to alter the water environment around the root, and see
how the pattern of root branches was affected. So, why did I choose to
work with maize? Which is not necessarily the easiest organism to work
with.

So, when I came into the lab, by and large, most of the researches at
the time were using Arabidopsis, it's in the mustard family. And that
species is really advantageous for a lot of genetic experiments
because it is very small which means that you can grow a whole lot of
plants in one greenhouse, and do very large-scale experiments. But
when it comes to looking at root development, the roots are very very
thin, they're only 100 microns thick which means that if you wanna
look at what direction a branch is emerging around that circumference,
it's very very difficult. So there you do need to have a microscope to
actually look at the roots, and it's a lot more laborious and time
consuming to work with Arabidopsis for this particular phenotype.

But when I came in, Jose, my PI was strongly encouraging of me trying
to use maize as an alternative model. And the reason for that was
because maize has these one millimeter thick roots, which make them
very easy to work with when you're looking at environmental
perturbations that vary across the circumference. So it's a lot easier
to physically manipulate a larger, bulkier root like that than a
really small, thin root like Arabidopsis.

You might ask the question, like: why would you wanna use maize
specifically? It has a large root, but there are other species that
also have large roots. There's rice and other larger species in the
cereal crop family, why not use those? And that kinda came down more
to the economics of things. So they say in America that corn is king,
so that was a very strong impetus for us to use maize specifically,
because we saw it as being more immediately relevant to agriculture in
the country that we were working in, thus making it potentially easier
to get funding and there was also a larger community of maize
researchers that we could then interact with. So there were a lot of
other benefits to using maize beyond just its role within the lab.