Inside Colorado's Weed Research Lab

[Music] By my money for security reasons, baggage unattended will be removed and destroyed. [Music] United Airlines flight 2120 one, Denver. [Music] Hi, I think you're looking for me. Hello, Internet's past gray here at a hotel in Denver, Colorado. Why? Well, for weeks, I've been thinking about tumbleweed, and what started as mild curiosity turned into a lot of reading and a lot of writing and hopefully a video future gray has finished and can put on the screen here now in editing. But for current me, it's still a work in progress.

As part of that, I came to the research lab here to talk to some of the world experts about why tumbleweeds are so troublesome and the work these professors and their students do at the weed lab. I'm really excited! I've run out of people who will talk to me about tumbleweed in real life. This is the kind of stuff we do a lot of. That's a photo I took. That is what happens when a mother plant tumbles in the wind, and then the farmer sprays and all of the progeny from this mother plant carry a resistance gene. If the farmer had not sprayed, if he had not sprayed, the whole field would have looked green.

Let's just do a walking tour of the facility. Oh, by the way, before I forget, that coffee was fantastic. Okay, yeah, that was great! Oh yeah, on the tour, I was able to see my first tumble tots in person and the various tortures weeds are put through at the lab to test their strengths and weaknesses in a variety of ways, particularly cold tolerance that I've got to experience firsthand. It's crazy how tough weeds can be and how fast they can adapt.

Here's an example where two weeds of the same species were sprayed with weed killer. The one on the left looks like it's doing better, but that's the one that's going to die because the weed on the right has a new mutation that lets it push all the weed killer into its outmost leaves to sacrifice them so the core can survive. This video was taken just before I arrived, so I got to see the survivor in person. So this is the one that got sprayed, and it totally survives. Now these are beautiful because he's nom. I'll go, yeah, right!

So they all have these little pores that survived, yeah, and just the outside parts time. Yeah, yeah, that's nuts though that this is the one you showed me that God loved that I thought was doomed. I thought this was totally doomed, and it's growing all up to be a big problem. The tumbleweeds, in particular, are insanely adaptive. Talking to the experts all day about the terror of tumbleweed and their seemingly endless ways to survive, I wanted to know why is it that some weeds are so much better at being weeds?

It was about the genome and just what it is that is fascinating about it. So you know genetic variation is the source of what natural selection acts on, and that's what enables species to respond to changes in climate over time. Imagine that an area around Salt Lake where you are, and the harshest final nips on the planet, ready? And yet tumbleweeds are frightening. You know, if you've seen those videos where they make a media plate that contains different antibiotics in series and put the bacteria to start, the mutation will happen. For instance, they'll grow, then they hit the next one, a mutation happens, and they grow, and so on.

Because bacteria divide every 15-20 minutes, you know it's happening so much faster. We're kind of asking maybe why one species is a better way than other ones is, and maybe they have a higher rate of generating all these sources of radiation and so extra copies of mutations in those copies. So that's what it is. It’s not just the weed has a gene which can metabolize a herbicide—it's that that weed has 50 copies of the same gene, which means the plant has all these places in which mutations can possibly occur that benefited processing like the different version of the herbicide and allowed it to survive while still being able to keep all of the copies for the old version of the herbicide, so it doesn't have to just like you take that one gene in the exact correct way.

Oh, what a pain in the ass! Yeah, yeah, exactly. Our working hypothesis right now is that kosha has a genome that is more from the mistakes that generate gene duplications than other species, and that could just be really beneficial, especially for something that is invading a new place. What makes a difference between just dying off and going extinct versus propagating across a continent? Maybe their error repair and machinery has lower fidelity, and this generates variation that can be adaptive.

And then where it gets even a bit more provocative is, does it respond to stress as a signal to the plant to relax its error repair mechanisms? We're not going to generate more novel genetic variations, and we don't really know that you get adaptive variation from stress in the plant. We'd like to test it and find out.

We took, or yeah, so if we can't beat them, the question is, can we turn tumbleweed to our advantage? Because we've done the full genome sequence of kosha, we want to explore the genes in these successful long-lasting weeds and see if there are traits that we can take out of the weeds and use them to improve soybeans or corn or cotton or whatever. If you had to pick the four things that I would pull out of a plant like kosher, so they're cold tolerant, they're extremely heat tolerant, they are also very drought tolerant, and it tolerates saline soils or salty soils.

So if you could put those four traits together and introduce them into crop genomes at the global level, I'm telling you it would be worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. Looking at weeds as more than just something to kill, control, and manage, but as a novel source of unique genes that could be beneficial for food and fuel production.

Well, the day is ending here, and it has totally been worth crossing the ocean for my brain is completely full of tumbleweed talk thanks to the team at the Colorado State weed lab. But I am exhausted. I've stayed on GMT, so it's much later for me here than it normally would be. So I hit need to get back to the hotel to sleep and to process everything to get up tomorrow morning to drive to the airport and to fly back home to make some adjustments to the script based on all of the conversations here so that future me can finish making that video. I think it's gonna be a good one. I'm really excited. You for something like this is as a person manually put in each seed in one at a time. Holy moly. [Music]