Discovery

Washington State University researchers have received half a million dollars to study a microscopic slime that they believe plays an outsized role in life on the planet.

The slime, also known as biofilm, forms a super-thin layer gluing the roots of plants to mineral surfaces and serves as a reactor in which a plant can break down the rock for vital nutrients. The process, says Kent Keller, was central to the start of land-based plant life as plants invaded the continents 350 million years ago. It continues to take place on modern volcanic ground and receding glaciers—anywhere a plant can’t get enough to eat.

A special root slime helps plants like this pine tree pull nutrients from bare rock. Flickr photo courtesy of eviltomthai.

“The magic of all of this is plants come in that are adapted to make the slime,” says Keller, co-director of the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach (CEREO) and professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “Within 100 years, you’ve got soil. That’s an amazing thing. And it’s these slimes that are a key part of the mechanism.”

Wait, there’s more: The biofilm reactor also facilitates the most fundamental process on the planet for packing away carbon, as seen in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As the plant dissolves minerals, the plant’s natural carbonic acids, made from CO₂ through photosynthesis, are transformed into bicarbonate that is carried in runoff to the oceans. There it precipitates as calcium carbonate.

In other words, the biofilm acts as an intermediary between carbon from the atmosphere and its storage in the earth’s crust. Absent that process, carbon dioxide would continue building up in the atmosphere until oxygen-dependent life forms suffocated in a “runaway greenhouse.”

“Without that we wouldn’t be here,” says Keller. “We’d be Venus, because Venus has no mechanism to sequester volcanic CO₂.”

But there’s a mystery to the process, which Keller and a group of colleagues will explore with $492,000 from the National Science Foundation. Somehow plants employ biofilms to build up nutrients for plants to use while also releasing them for long-term storage, and they’ve done this in a way in which plants thrive and the chemistry of oceans and the atmosphere is kept in balance.

The researchers—a team of earth, life, and soil scientists—plan to grow trees in different nutrient conditions, including pure sand, to see which are best at inducing the formation of biofilm. One indicator of that will be microbial communities, which essentially generate the biofilms for shelter. The researchers hypothesize that plants in the worst conditions will be predisposed to hosting the most diverse microbial communities, the better to generate slime and nutrients.

One experiment will rely entirely on fertilized irrigation as a proxy for conventional agriculture, which is less reliant on large microbial communities for nutrients. Comparing this system with those generating their own nutrients could help open the door to agricultural systems that can use fewer artificial fertilizers.

Claudia Fitch’s artwork at Qwest Field: “The Colossal Heads”

Anyone who happens to drop by the WSU Museum of Art between January 13 and April 2, 2011 will notice the display of creativity from Claudia Fitch. Her collection spans more than two decades (1987-2010). Fitch graduated in 1975 with a BFA in painting from the University of Washington and received her MFA in painting in 1979 from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.  She currently resides and works in Seattle, and her art is displayed at both the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle as well as the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York.

The majority of Fitch’s art exhibitions have been featured in New York and Seattle, but she has had her work featured as far away as the Netherlands.  Her first piece was a miniature cityscape in the midst of a real cityscape in New York, which creates an interesting contrast.  Some of Fitch’s fellowships include the New York State Council on the Arts, through Sculpture Space, Utica (1989), the Artist Trust Fellowship in Visual Arts, Seattle (1992), and the Art + Architecture Program Fellowship, European Ceramics Work Center (2006).  Fitch was also commissioned to create artwork for the Eastgate Park and Ride in Bellevue and those visiting Qwest Field in Seattle might have noticed her creation entitled “The Colossal Heads.”

On January 20, a reception and lecture on Fitch’s artwork were held in WSU’s art building.  During the reception, visitors to the art museum had the opportunity to stroll around the room and peruse Fitch’s creations, while munching on snacks or sipping drinks. It doesn’t take an expert art critic to notice that Fitch’s work presents a strong contrast in medium and shape.  Fitch has created a range of pieces, some of which are 3-D, attached to the walls or sitting on the floor, as well as traditional pencil-drawn pictures made to hang on the wall.  She easily combines 2-D and 3-D structures and plays with a range of shapes to create a final product.

Keith Wells, curator of exhibitions in the WSU Art Museum, writes that Fitch “cannot be classified by her materials.  In fact, her accomplishments in painting, draftsmanship, sculpture and installation make it difficult to categorize her by medium or technique.”

Claudia Fitch, Interior, 2000

During the lecture, Fitch discussed her work at length, for about an hour.  As she talked, Fitch clicked through slides of her artwork, displayed on the projector screen. She described the inspiration for her art, which is often related to dreams that she has.  Another interesting source of creativity is her postcard collection, from which she conducts silhouette studies as well as flocking.  Fitch’s work isn’t easily defined, and she has to trust the way that things are put together—going with her gut instinct of what feels right in order to develop a piece of artwork.  When Claudia went to school in the 1970s, she says that post-modernism was popular, and she also cannot avoid looking at art through a cultural lens.

In an interview with Debby Stinson from the WSU Museum of Art, Fitch comments on what she perceives as the message of her art: “I like to bring the bland conventional together with the personal use of art (as in a statue) and see them interplay.  I love the quote, ‘Art deepens the mystery.’…I try to let the message be an afterthought… I hope my art has humor, and my personal vision is brought to bear against the cultural convention and somehow, somewhere in the process, the mystery of art comes through.”

Claudia Fitch, Floating Mechanism (nightshade), 2010