GMO bananas and other topics with Pamela Ronald - Audiommunity Episode 6

[Repost of Food Matters post at SciAm, originally published June 5th, 2014]

Bananas are delicious. Personally, my favorite consumption methods are in oatmeal or cereal, in smoothies, or just on their own (for the record, I peel them the right way, not from the stem like some savage). But bananas aren't just some tasty delicacy, they're actually a staple crop for millions of people, just behind wheat, rice and corn in terms of importance. Which is why a banana-decimating pathogen has the potential to negatively impact millions of people in East Africa.

So what if you could cross one plant that normally resists the infection with the bananas that these farmers grow? That would be awesome right? Unfortunately, there aren't any banana varieties that are resistant, they all succumb to infection. But luckily, rice plants do have a resistance gene, and we know what it is. And it turns out, if you put that gene into bananas, they are completely resistant to infection by this banana wilt bacterium.

A few months ago, some colleagues and I started Audiommunity, a podcast about the immune system. Our goal for the podcast and for the website we're building around it, is to generate an educational resource for people at all levels of education to learn about the immune system, including current, cutting edge research. For the most recent episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing my co-blogger Pamela Ronald, the scientist who first discovered that rice resistance gene (called Xa 21) over 20 years ago, and is now working on making those awesome GMO bananas that could save millions of lives. 

On the left, a Xanthamonas-infected banana plant. On
the right, an infected plant expressing Xa21.

We know Pam as a great educator when it comes to issues of crop genetics and sustainable agriculture, but it turns out that she's also an expert on plant immunity. On the podcast, we talk about how she got interested in science, what motivated her to start studying plant immunity, and some of her lab's recent work on genetically engineering banana plants to express the Xa21 resistance gene. Check it out on emmunity.org, or find "Audiommunity" on itunes.

Adobe Illustrator for Scientists

Scientists have a number of jobs other than just doing experiments. Of those other jobs, one the most important is communicating the results of those experiments. From publishing papers to giving scientific talks, to writing grants, data has to be shown visually, preferably in a pleasing manner. As I like to say - all of your research is worthless unless you tell someone about it (and they listen).

In order to do this communicating, every scientist that I'm aware of at some point has had to approach Adobe Illustrator (or related vector-image software), which is a rat's nest of options and tools, many of which are incredibly useful, but most of which are complicated and not easy to surface. Most of my colleagues end up finding the 3 or 4 basic tools that fulfill the bare minimum of requirements for putting together a figure and leave it at that. 

This instinct is easy to understand - Illustrator is complicated, and scientists have a lot of demands on their time. It feels like a waste of that time to watch youtube tutorials that show you how to draw a strawberry* when you've got experiments to run. I've watched probably 30 hours of tutorial videos like that one, and it's incredibly frustrating since it feels like you have to watch an hour to extract 5 minutes of useful tools, but you have no idea even what those useful tools are until you seem them used.

That said, despite all of that time "wasted," being comfortable in Illustrator probably saved me hundreds of hours over the course of writing my paper and my dissertation, since making figures, displaying data, and even making cartoons for presentations has become faster and easier (not to mention better looking). A peer reviewer for a review article I wrote recently specifically praised the quality of the figures. 

Because I don't want other scientists to suffer through irrelevant tutorial videos like I did, about 6 months ago, I made a set of tutorial videos that explains how to use illustrator that's specifically targeted at scientists. The whole series is about an hour, and encompasses the most useful and time saving tools that I've found. I thought I'd throw them up here to make them a bit more discoverable - hope you find them useful. And if you run into any issues or have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

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*I should point out that that strawberry tutorial was the first one I watched, and actually gave me a great foundation for getting to understand the software.