After “Mars Curiosity,” a space probe sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), successfully landed on Mars Aug. 5, UC Davis researchers continued to work.

The 567-million-kilometer journey marked the 12th successful NASA Mars mission out of 16 attempted since 1964.

Dawn Sumner, UC Davis associate professor in geology, is a member of the Mars Exploration Program Advisory Group, a group of NASA scientists who help determine the goals of NASA’s Mars projects.

“We have to make decisions every day as to what the rover is going to do,” Sumner said.
For more than eight years, the US has had a continual robotic presence on the Martian surface.

Another Mars rover, named “Sojourner,” landed on Mars in 1997 and was the first probe to use the technique of landing a rover by allowing it to bounce on the surface using an air bag.

“The [Curiosity] rover is so big that they couldn’t use the same air bag landing system,” Sumner said.

One of Sumner’s students, Amy Williams, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in geology, is also involved with the Mars Curiosity mission. She’s a member of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) science team and will help choose science targets on the ground to answer questions.

Williams has had an interest in space exploration for many years.

“I’ve always been kind of a sci-fi nerd, and enjoyed the thought of searching for life in the universe,” Williams said. “When the chance to work with Dawn and MSL came around, it seemed like the perfect fit — an opportunity to become an astrobiologist.”

Williams is currently working with Athena Phan, a UC Davis undergraduate and member of Sumner’s team.

“I’m doing an analogous research project [on Earth] because the exploration for evidence of life on Mars begins with comprehending how life is imprinted on Earth,” Phan said.

The Mars Curiosity rover could be functional for several years and NASA scientists will be working to obtain funding to continue the project into the future as long as is desired.

BRIAN RILEY can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

In a world of flesh and cellulose, who holds the power?  Do we, the flesh, hold the power to cut down the trees, or do the trees hold to power to relieve us of our air once they are gone?  This attitude of mutually assured destruction is the wrong way to go about creating balance.  Like it or not, we are stuck with each other.  But plants do not have to be a constant hindrance to human expansion, and humans do not have to be a grim reaper for the woods and forests.

This summer when I visited Floriade, the once-per-decade World Horticultural Expo in the Netherlands, I had the privilege to see the power and beauty of what can be done when man doesn’t just accommodate nature, but embraces it and folds nature and technology together.  A house that grows its own food on the walls, buildings made from living trees that heal themselves when damaged and home-sized algae reactors that can clean the air and provide valuable biomass were only a few of the innovations present at Floriade.

There were houses that processed their waste to charge electric cars, and lighting systems that captured natural sunlight and released it at night without any need for electrical power.  But even more impressive than the technology present at the expo was the cooperative presence of over 20 countries.  Each contributing country constructed a pavilion incorporating the national architectural aesthetic as well as a botanical technology innovation.  If we were lucky, the national pavilions were also serving their national dishes.

Chicken curry odors wafted and gemstones sparkled from the Nepal pavilion. Sambouseks from Turkey made mouths water from hundreds of feet away.  Wood carvings and jewelry from Sudan showed the artistic side of a country torn apart by strife.

Countries from every continent were represented, from Yemen and Turkey, China and South Korea, Spain and Italy, Indonesia, Nepal, Ecuador, Kenya and even Pakistan and Sudan.  Visiting each pavilion was like taking an international flight to the country itself.  The smells, the plants, the architecture and the garden styles were all emblematic of the host country, and all were as different as the countries themselves.

In a time when the world is becoming more and more concerned about our ecological future, Floriade was a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air, reminding visitors that human ingenuity reaches beyond finding better ways to mine, cut and burn.  When our minds are set to the task, we can create art that we can live in, and industry that is beautiful to look at.  We can create self-sustaining environments that contain more biodiversity than any other place on earth.

This international and inter-species cooperation represents a new paradigm of where our society should be heading.  One country changing its environmental policy will have little effect if other nations do not follow suit.  What Floriade demonstrated was that even the most industrial nations, even the countries with their minds set on expansion, can do so with absolutely no harm to the environment.

The technologies that come out of such an endeavor can often bud off technologies that, even with no practical value, can provide an aesthetic alternative to existing technologies.  Hanging gardens in your kitchen, kitchen tables made of grass and flowers that will use the crumbs you spill as compost, the list goes on.

And just when you think that the walk-around naturalism is becoming too much to handle, you can take a ride on a cable car gondola 300 feet above the park powered by 100 percent solar energy.

Technology is not anti-nature, and nature is not anti-technology.  The two can coincide beautifully, and with better results than if either were working independently.  You do not have to visit Floriade to understand how beneficial such a mindset can be.

HUDSON LOFCHIE can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Usually when one thinks of tomatoes, images of nice round fruits with a bright red color spring to mind. Heirloom tomatoes, on the other hand, typically don’t enjoy the same patterns of uniform redness. However, despite their lackluster color, a distinction in their genetics allows them to exhibit a higher level of sweetness than their traditional red counterparts.

In a June study conducted by UC Davis and Cornell plant biologists, researchers gained new insight into these differences.

The amount of selective breeding devoted to creating a perfect color has lead to the unintentional reduction in tomato flavor. Farmers have traditionally selected varieties of tomatoes that are lighter green before ripening. This allowed for easier identification of ripe tomatoes for harvest but also gradually lowered the overall sweetness of the fruits harvested. The lighter green color is due to a reduced amount of chloroplasts, the sugar-producing part of the plant.

Ann Powell, a UC Davis biochemist, and her team sought to better understand how this information specifically pertains to fruit growth and development. In their efforts, they identified a series of transcription factors that could lead to higher sugar levels in tomatoes.

“Sugar is a flavor enhancer; as we increase sugar levels, we increase the flavor of raw tomatoes,” Powell said.

The research effort focused on finding sequences in the tomato genome responsible for how the fruits ripened. Specifically, researchers isolated segments of DNA where expression would result in differences in color or fruit quality. Researchers identified two important transcription factors, genetic material responsible for regulating the expression of other genes.

According to the study, expression of the transcription factors GLK1 and GLK2 resulted in tomatoes exhibiting a darker shade of green prior to ripening. This color was the end product of the transcription factors increasing production of chloroplasts in the fruits compared to their traditional processed counterparts.

Powell, the coauthor of the study, said that tomato breeders had unintentionally selected strains of tomatoes exhibiting a missense mutation of the GLK2 gene by breeding for tomatoes with their appealing uniform color.

A missense mutation is a change in the DNA sequence that prevents a gene from being properly translated into a protein.

This premature stop sequence cleaves the resulting protein early and renders it ineffective. In the case of GLK2, it no longer functioned to increase sugar levels. However, the higher chloroplast concentrations in the darker green tomatoes that don’t exhibit the mutation result in higher sugar concentrations in the fruit.

Traditionally, tomatoes are harvested at a specified percentage brix, a by-weight concentration measurement for dissolved sugars, and then cooked to artificially increase these concentrations. By utilizing the increased chloroplasts found in the darker strains of tomatoes, tomato farmers have the potential to harvest higher quality tomatoes per unit time.

“Nature presents numerous important genes and their variants, like uniform ripening, that breeders employ to facilitate the needs of growers, processors and consumers,” said Jim Giovannoni, a USDA plant molecular biologist with the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. “Understanding the genes responsible for these characteristics facilitates the challenging process of breeding crops that meet the needs of all components of the food-supply chain.”

The increased efficiency or quality of the tomatoes harvested could potentially translate into cheaper, higher-quality tomatoes for everyone.

ALAN LIN can be reached at science@theaggie.org.