[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 and as part of that I came to
the research lab here to talk to some of
the world experts about why tumbleweed
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 and 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 we
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 a 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 and 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 when these videos
where they make a media plate that
contains a different antibiotics in
series and put the bacteria to start and
the mutation will happen for existence
and they'll grow then they hit the next
one a mutation happens and they grow and
so on because bacteria divide any 15-20
minutes
you know it's happening so much faster
were 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 radiation
and so extra copies mutations in those
copies so that's what it is it's not
just the weed has a gene which can
metabolize a herbicide is that that weed
has 50 copies of the same gene which
means the plant has all these places in
which
teachers can possibly occur that
benefited for processing like the
different version of the herbicide and
allowed 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
they're their error repair and machinery
has lower fidelity and this generates
variation that can be adaptive and then
where it gives us even a bit more
provocative as does it responds stress
is that 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 planet 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 or
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 a
very drought tolerant it tolerates the
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 and 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
airports 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]