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Durham, N.C. -- Duke researchers have been studying something that happens too slowly for our eyes to see. A team in biologist
Philip Benfey's lab wanted to see how plant roots burrow into the soil. So they set up a camera on rice seeds sprouting in clear gel, taking a new picture every 15 minutes for several days after germination.
When they played their footage back at 15 frames per second, compressing 100 hours of growth into less than a minute,
they saw that rice roots use a trick to gain their first foothold in the soil: their growing tips make corkscrew-like motions, waggling and winding in a helical path.
By using their time-lapse footage, along with a root-like robot to test ideas, the researchers gained
new insights into how and why plant root tips twirl as they grow.
The first clue came from something else the team noticed: some roots can't do the corkscrew dance. The culprit, they found, is a mutation in a gene called HK1 that makes them grow straight down, instead of circling and meandering like other roots do.
The team also noted that the mutant roots grew twice as deep as normal ones. Which raised a question: "What does the more typical spiraling tip growth do for the plant?" said
Isaiah Taylor, a postdoctoral associate in Benfey's lab at Duke.
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