Faculty and students often work together on research projects.
This past March, Eric Kramer, faculty in Science, Mathematics, and Computing, and student Ethan Ackelsberg ’12 co-authored the scientific paper “Auxin Metabolism Rates and Implications for Plant Development,” published in the scientific journal Frontiers.
Auxin, a multitasking plant hormone, can accumulate inside a cell and trigger a series of events that cause it to grow and divide—eventually becoming a whole new flower or leaf. Eric has been conducting plant hormone studies for the past 15 years. In the summer of 2013, he enlisted Ethan’s help to gather data, to help clarify the auxin economy of plants.
Ethan reviewed dozens of published papers on auxin metabolism, trying to answer questions like, “How much auxin can a plant manufacture?” and “What level of auxin concentration must accumulate inside a cell to trigger the growth of a flower?” He spent months analyzing the data in these papers and building a database of auxin metabolism rates. This labor-intensive analysis, the first of its kind, revealed how fast plants manufacture and break down the hormone.
In the following 18 months, Eric continued to study auxin production, with Ethan periodically assisting in the analysis. They submitted their paper in December 2014 and two months later it was accepted for publication.