878: Researching Flood Resistance in Rice and Other Plants - Dr. Julia Bailey-Serres

Welcome and introductions

0:00Thanks for joining me today for episode 878 of People Behind the Science. I'm Dr. Marie McNeely, and this week I'm happy to revisit our interview with our guest, Dr. Julia Bailey-Sarris. Listeners, Julia studies how plants survive water extremes with the goal of improving the ability of crops to survive a temporary flood. Her research considers the genetic variation that exists in nature that allows rice to be productive in environments with flood conditions during the growing season. And in our conversation,

0:32Julia shares some wonderful stories about her life and science. So get ready to meet another one of our outstanding people behind the science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science.

Background and early life

1:06Hello, everyone, and welcome to the People Behind the Science podcast. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Julia Bailey-Sarris. So, Julia, welcome to the show today. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much. Well, thank you for joining us today. And I'm looking forward to learning more about you and the wonderful work you do. But before we dive into those details, let me first start by telling our listeners a little bit more about you and your background. So listeners, Julia is Director of the Center for Plant Cell Biology and Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of California,

1:39Riverside. She also holds the University of California, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair, and is Professor of Rice Physiology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Julia was awarded her Bachelor's Degree in Biology from the University of Utah and her PhD in Botany from the University of Edinburgh. Afterwards, Julia conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty there at UCR. Now, she has received many awards and honors over the course of her career, including being named an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of

2:13Science, and a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists. In addition, Julia has been recognized with a Stephen Hale Prize from the American Society of Plant Biologists and the Anton Lang Research Excellence Award from Michigan State University. And in our conversation today, Julia is going to share more about both her life and her research. So Julia, we look forward to getting to know more about your science, but also more about you. So can you start by telling us what you like to do when you're not doing science? Some of my favorite things to do are gardening and hiking,

2:44traveling, enjoying my family, cooking at home, and just enjoying life with friends and family. Sounds wonderful. What do you like to cook? I'm particularly a baker, so I can bake just about anything, but together we like to make recipes. Oh, that sounds wonderful. Do you cook things from the garden as well, or is it mostly flowers? Oh, right now we're cooking a lot from the garden. Because of the pandemic, I have the best vegetable garden that I've ever had. So just about every meal has multiple ingredients

3:15from the garden. Oh, that's phenomenal. There is a silver lining then. Well, it sounds like you've got quite a bit to keep you busy outside of the science, but I'd love to talk about your work as well. So how do you describe your work to people who maybe aren't familiar with genetics and plant biology? So I would say that as a professor, I work with graduate students and other researchers to try to understand ways to improve how plants survive water extremes. So we mostly study how to improve crops' ability to endure just a temporary flood.

3:47Excellent. Well, I look forward to chatting more about some of this exciting work and the relevance it has to the world today as we go through our conversation. But I'd love to stop here to talk about motivation. I think many of us, including myself, can always use a bit of extra motivation and inspiration. So I love gathering little quotes and sayings and things to help keep me motivated throughout my day. So Juliette, do you have a favorite quote that really inspires or motivates you? A quote that's been meaningful to me for a very long time is one from Henry David Thoreau, and it's, In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World. So to me, it was a really inspiring quote

4:24in terms of just considering nature and that it is delicate and also of great value to mankind. And I would say just over the years, I have gone back time and time again to realize how much we can learn from nature. For example, with our research on flooding, the ways in which plants can survive a flood exist there in nature in wild species. And it's really just learning about that that's really enabled us to improve a number of crops and their ability to survive a flood.

4:57Certainly. Well, I know Thoreau has some inspirational works and there's a lot of great sources of inspiration out there. And particularly as a scientist, I think you get to work with some phenomenal people, whether these are your mentors, advisors, or just role models that you've looked up to. So Juliette, are there particular people who really stick out in your mind as those who've had a big impact on you in your career? I would say that most of the individuals who have truly inspired me happen to be women. So the first one is Barbara McClintock. She won the Nobel Prize in, I believe it was 1982,

5:30for her work on corn and understanding the chromosomes and also a family of genes that move around, transposons of corn. And from her, I understood just the importance of looking carefully and deeply at an individual organism, just really getting to know a system. That was a really inspirational message early on for me as a scientist. And then after that, as a postdoc, I met a woman by the name of Sarah Hake. She's also a maize geneticist. She works on

6:04corn. And from her, I really learned this balance between focus as a scientist and being able to balance having a family. She really impressed me by the fact that she was stellar in her work, but she was just so focused and determined with what she did that she was able to be a mother of two young boys at the same time when she was really accelerating in her research discoveries. And then one more woman is a woman that I didn't meet until about 2002. Her name is Natasha Reichel.

6:38She's an incredibly inspiring plant biologist who came to UCR to help develop the center that I am now the director of, the Center for Plant Cell Biology. And Natasha really taught me to have a vision, that it wasn't enough to just want to do something, is that if you were going to take on any level of responsibility, you wanted to have a vision. And moreover, that vision really needed to be something that had an impact. And it was just so clear from our interactions that that impact was

7:12something that was going to go from the local community as far afield as possible. And so I just felt that that's been a really important message to me sort of in this latter part of my career, where I've tried to do things that are not just research focused, but also focused on education. Definitely. And I think the work that you do both in the education sphere and the research sphere has potential for tremendous impact. So I'm curious to hear how you got started on this path. So

Childhood and education

7:41Julia, when you think back to the very beginning, do you have particular memories of maybe you first starting to get interested in plants or science? My love of plants began as a child in the hills behind our family home, which was in San Diego County. We lived abutting a coastal sage community. So it's an ecosystem where in the late spring and summer and into the fall, it's just very dry. But then when there's winter rains, things green up. And then

8:14there's this tremendous bloom of wildflowers and just so much opportunity to explore. And the hill behind our house, we named certain areas by things that happened. So there was daisy land, but there was also rattlesnake canyon. So we had a lot of respect for the wildlife that was out there and just running around and discovering and making forts in that community was what inspired me to consider plants and to discover botany. From there, I thought I wanted to become a forester and enrolled at Humboldt State University and soon

8:49discovered that my interest was in botany. And from there, with a little few twists and turns, I had tremendous opportunity to join a lab after taking a course in electron microscopy. I did this as an undergraduate, but it was a course for graduate students over the summer. And it was just this opportunity to begin to look deeply at cells and also at nucleic acids of cells, so the DNA of cells. And it was from that undergraduate research experience that there were stepping stones that

9:23went from that experience at the University of Utah to the University of Edinburgh. I did my PhD and then on to Berkeley until now. So the journey really started in the backyard and I'm so inspired by what's in the backyard, but that was what was so important as a child. Oh, I love it. And I like this decision that you made to go international for your PhD. So can you talk about maybe what led to that decision, what that experience was like? I think I was fortunate to have mentors that helped to direct me

9:55to possibilities that weren't just in the United States. And I would say one of the most important things to me was that I had a partner early on who was not afraid of going abroad. And so really, we went together to Edinburgh and it was a tremendous experience. It's not easy to be a graduate student abroad. There are a lot of things that you have to learn as you go along, but it was really a life-forming experience. So no regrets. So I had a wonderful mentor

10:26in Edinburgh named Chris Lieber. Oh, phenomenal. It sounds like you had a wonderful path to your current position there at UCR. So

Plant research and flooding

10:34you're doing so many cool projects at the moment. It's probably hard to pick just one, but is there one particular thing that's going on in the lab right now that you are just the most excited about and want to tell us more about today, Julia? So right now, I'm just extremely excited about how the things that we've been doing for many years are coming together. So I would say that our work is really focused on plants, focused on oxygen, which is really the elixir of life, and focused on having oftentimes too much water,

11:06which happens when there's a flood. And we know now that with climate change, there's just many more floods that are affecting agriculture. And right now, my group has been sort of pulling together strands that go from cell biology to farmer's fields. And so we've really worked on genes that have been found by breeders that help rice to endure different types of floods. And we've really tried to understand how those genes work. And one of them really important gene is a

11:37gene that's called sub one for submergence one. And it's a gene that allows a rice plant to when it's completely underwater to pretty much conserve its energy until the flood subsides and the plant can regrow. And my group has worked on how the plant cell senses a lack of oxygen and also a lack of energy. And what we've learned at that real molecular level has really become relevant to

12:10our understanding of how this one gene works in a rice plant. And then also how looking across crop species and also in plants and nature, how these mechanisms exist, that they're regulated in a slightly different manner to give sort of one trait versus another trait. So to give this trait of ability to hunker down and survive a flood versus the trait of if there's a flood, the plant can instead try to really outgrow the flood. So work that I'm doing now in my group and also with other groups

12:47takes this really broad look at how different plants respond, for example, to being submerged or to lacking oxygen. And from working on these multiple angles, we're really getting a perspective of how we can either look for variation that exists in nature, whereby you can have a benefit in a flood, or we can take a more engineering or synthetic biology approach and perhaps tweak genes with

13:17genome editing and improve potentially the ability to survive. And both of those means to an end are very important because in some cases, the variation in nature is quite accessible. And in other cases, we really can't even find it in a species. And so we really don't have a choice. So I just say we're having a lot of fun looking at this question that's so important, the resilience to flooding from multiple angles, and also with people who's really are just interested in the cell biology,

13:49and then other people are really interested in getting crops to farmers so that they have yields, even if there is a severe flooding event. Well, Julia, this is really fascinating. And I'm curious, when you're looking at these traits, is it sort of an on-off when it comes to flood resistance? Or are there maybe varying degrees of ability to survive, for example, a minor flood versus a major flood? What are we talking about in terms of the types of differences you see? So there's definitely variations. And it's because there's more than one gene that can have an effect. Some have

14:23very small effects, and some have large effects. And it's really important to get the groups of genes. So if it's four genes that really have the effect that allow the plant to really hunker down for the longest time, get the four forms of those genes together in the cultivar, so that you have that particular strength in the trait. So it's a matter of discovering these genetic combinations that can give you degrees of variation. And even, as I said, in terms of submergence, there's really two different ways to deal with the stress.

14:57One is to outgrow it, and one is to just survive it and tolerate it. And in that case, it has to be short-term in order for the plant ultimately to be able to recover and then be productive. Well, this is fascinating work. And as you mentioned, really relevant today when floods have been a huge issue across the world. So thank you for telling us more about this project. And I think every scientist, though, despite some of these exciting projects you get to work on, you have frustrating days. There are failures, there are challenges you have to kind of work your way

15:28through. And I think it's so important to share these stories with our listeners, because I think they often go unheard in science. So Juliette, do you have a story of maybe one of your own failures or a challenge that you work through that you can tell us more about today? Oh, I have to say that I've had many challenges and also many failures. And this is something that working with undergraduates and graduate students and postdocs is really a challenge, because you have to learn that you need the controls. And sometimes things just don't work because your hypothesis is wrong, or you just haven't had probably the necessary serendipity

16:03to get things just right. So I always think of science as being very much like the children's game shoots and ladders. Oh, yeah. So we can climb up a ladder, but you can be on the next tier and then suddenly you're back down pretty much to zero. So we've had so many challenges. And oftentimes it's that you're looking for the last piece of a puzzle, or you just have two pieces and they are not connected. So in terms of a recent success, I would say that this isn't necessarily a success. But

16:37in my view, as scientists, it's best if we can work together. And you have to have a lot of trust in one another, because science truly is competitive. And it's just really important to embrace collaboration, because oftentimes, the way to take that step forward, really is through conversation and collaboration. And so a recent success that I had was just sort of a happenstance collaboration, that then unknowingly, there was another group sort of working on the same system.

17:13And the reason why this was a success actually wasn't that recent, but it was a really important success. The success really came from the fact that two groups of teams independently determined the same mechanism whereby plants sense oxygen and really a decline in oxygen levels. I mean, you're probably very well aware that this year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine went to the understanding of the understanding of how oxygen is sensed in mammals and just the relevance of

17:47that to medicine. Well, there's a corollary in plants. And it was really the identification of that mechanism in plants where two groups sort of looked at this at the same time and came up with the same answer. So that was really a very powerful challenge that turned out to be a success because of this confirmation that was independent. That's one thing. Another recent success for me personally was to get a new graduate training program that's in the area of going from basic

18:19plant biology to translation of that knowledge to something that's of relevance either in agriculture or in biotechnology. And I would say that this was a real challenge that ultimately became a success because I sort of anticipated I could just write one grant, but I had to write the grant several times in order to finally get funded by this NSF competition. Absolutely. And I'm curious to kind of go back to that story where there were two groups working on essentially the same project to determine that mechanism. Did you know at the time that the other group was kind of working on the same boat?

18:52Was it a race to the finish? We didn't know until very close to the end that we were working on the same mechanism. And it was really nice because the work done by the two different collaborations was quite complimentary in the end. Oh, that's wonderful. And going back to this grant, then you mentioned this as an exciting success. How did you celebrate after multiple submissions when you finally got that notice of award? I celebrated with my colleagues at UC Riverside. So we celebrated together within the Center for Plant Cell Biology. Yeah, with a party. Oh, wonderful.

19:25It's a celebration for faculty as well as graduate students because it's a graduate training program that hopefully over time will really have a significant impact in not just the preparation of these individuals for their careers potentially in industry, but also in bringing in more diversity and just increasing the mobility of students to go from perhaps a lack of opportunity early on to really being able to contribute significantly to science and engineering.

19:58Definitely. Well, Julia, congratulations on these successes. And I really like how you frame them as challenges that you were able to turn into a success. And I think that is so important in science because oftentimes you're just faced with all these challenges and it's what you make of them that determines what your outcome and what your success in science is going to be. So I'm so glad you shared those stories with us. And I'd love to talk next about some of the opportunities that you've had to travel in

Fieldwork in Bangladesh and India

20:23science. I think this is a big part of the career that a lot of people maybe don't necessarily realize as part of the career, but you do go all over the world, whether it's for training, like you mentioned at the University of Edinburgh, or whether it's to go to conferences or to work with collaborators. So when you think back on all the places that your science has taken you, Julia, what are some of the most memorable places that you've been to? There are two trips in my life as a scientist that really stand out. The first one was a trip that I took with a group of people from the International Research Institute, as well as

20:55some collaborators that I'd worked with for several years to study this gene Sub1A. And we traveled to Bangladesh and to India where farmers were growing the new Sub1A containing cultivars in their fields. And so these were individuals who their farm advisors, their regional farm advisors had shared with them seed, a number of different packages of seed and said, please plant these in areas where you have a challenge from time to time with floods that then affect the productivity of the crop in

21:29those areas. And oftentimes it's like they have this low-lying region in their paddy rice where the monsoon rains will come and the rice will be underwater and the modern cultivars, the cultivars that give them high yields will typically die. And we had the good fortune of going to a number of different farm advisory locations and then also to farmers fields in both Bangladesh and in India, where they had planted these different packets of seeds. And so they would have rows that were about

22:01two meters wide by maybe 10 meters long. And they would show us, well, this was our new regular variety. And these were some of the varieties that we were given. And they had crops that were going to be productive. And during that trip, two things happened. One is that I had this idea that I wanted to talk to women in those communities to get a perspective of how this new rice, just what their impression was and just what they thought about it, if anything. So we had conversations through

22:33translators and just learned from this wonderful woman back in rural Bangladesh. She just said, I was so happy when I saw that the rice after the flood had regrown. And she was holding her child in her arms with a group of women and children behind her beaming with joy. And to me, that was just like, wow. That's a success. Coming from a research lab to hear that was just really profound. The second thing on that trip was that I had the opportunity to appreciate that it wasn't just

23:06flooding that was a problem for these farmers. They depend upon the rain. And so they have early rains typically, but then they later have droughts. And it made me just really perceive that as a researcher, we had to really look at the interaction between these genes in different situations. So the gene that we're saying is a solution for flooding, what is the consequence of having that gene in terms of drought? And so that was just like an amazing trip just for personal reasons and intellectual reasons as

23:37well. And then the other trip was more of an adventure that I took with my son. We decided to take a trip to the Peruvian Amazon. So it was a vacation. And as a flooding biologist, it was just really special and important to me to have had the opportunity to have been on a boat for a full week in the Amazon to really appreciate the dynamics of a flooded ecosystem and the variety of plants that live

24:07in those environments. And this sort of just goes back to this learning from nature. There's many traits in that ecosystem and other flooded ecosystems that I think we just right now don't appreciate. And they may not be available in the diversity of crop species. They may be something that's very special to some of the tree crops and other crops in those areas. But I just think that there's a lot of genetic design in nature that we can really go and appreciate over time. So I'm excited that this is an open

24:42opportunity for people. Wonderful. So did you come back from that trip to Peru, maybe reinvigorated and full of new ideas? Absolutely. And some really nice photographs as well. It sounds amazing. So what were you able to see and do while you were there? Were there any wildlife encounters or things that really stood out? We did do a lot of bird watching and also saw a lot of just species, monkeys, dolphins, everything. It was wonderful. I completely recommend it. Find a good ecotourism company with low impact.

25:15Absolutely. It sounds like a phenomenal opportunity. And I'm intrigued by this trip to India and Bangladesh as well. And you mentioned that sort of interaction with the genetics of resisting drought and resisting flooding. What were some of your findings? Or is this still in process? We had already made an observation about the sub1a gene in terms of drought. So the important thing is that having that gene based on what we know from our research and also what we know from farmers growing it in fields doesn't affect the ability of the rice to endure a drought. It doesn't make it

25:48better and it doesn't make it worse in the farmer's field. But in sort of our control experiments in the greenhouse, what we learned is if there was a drought, the sub1 plants had this ability for the shoots to regrow. And probably the best way to explain this is perhaps seeing a patch of grass that can really appear to have completely died back, but you can water it and it will regrow. And that's because it will have shoot, meristem, sort of the growth tips remain alive when it looks like it's

26:20completely dead. But given the right circumstances, hence water, it will regrow. And sub1 has this ability, we found, to really protect those shoot meristems for a long time. And it will do that both under submergence as well as drought. So yeah, we're continuing to explore that interaction and to really to compare and contrast those two stresses and what happens in root systems as well as in the shoot meristem of rice. Oh, that is so cool. And I think it is amazing that you were able to sort of

26:52get their boots on the ground and see the impact that your research is having for real people, for real farmers out there who are trying to grow rice in these difficult conditions. Well, it sounds like

Reading and scientific community

27:02a wonderful opportunity. As we mentioned, I know as a scientist, you are constantly immersed in the research and the work that you're doing and in the literature in your field. But we love to encourage all of our listeners out there to read for fun as well, to pick up a book. So Juliette, do you have a favorite book, whether it's related to science or not, that you can recommend for all of us to add to our own reading lists? So I'm an avid reader, and I read all types of books. But if I think about it, I'm sort of just stuck on thinking about this importance of nature to modern day

27:32scientists. And along those lines, there was a wonderful book published a couple years ago by Andrea Wolf, and it's called The Innovation of Nature. In that book, she describes a lot about the lives and the adventures and collection of Alexander von Humboldt, and also some other early scientists who were focused on botany. So it was just a really interesting book to realize these adventures and

28:03the level of detail and determination that these individuals had on these collecting trips to places such as Cuba and Brazil and also to Mexico. It was just really quite amazing to consider the types of environments and hardships that they endured in order to bring back these collections of plants, which they then studied and many others have studied for so many years. Oh, it sounds like a wonderful book. I think it makes you appreciate all the modern conveniences

28:33when you read these sorts of books. No kidding. Well, Julia, you are the first to recommend The Innovation of Nature. We will add this to our reading list on our website for our listeners. And one thing we haven't yet talked about are some of the different personalities and the wonderful people that you encounter in science. And I know, Julia, there are so many stereotypes out there in the media of what scientists are like and maybe what life as a scientist is like. And we try to break some of those stereotypes on our show because I think so many of the scientists I know are these amazing, creative, funny, multifaceted

29:05people, but that's not often the reputation that scientists get. So when you think back about your own experiences in your career, are there particular examples of maybe quirky traditions that you experienced in different laboratories or just funny or fun memories that you shared with colleagues that go against some of these stereotypes that people might have? Well, I think that the most important message is that scientists are people just like everyone else. I like to think that this message is related to younger people who are thinking about becoming a

29:36scientist. There's no stereotype. You're going to be yourself and there will be all different types of personalities and variety is the spice of life. And I think that just people not just doing their science, but sharing life experiences, appreciating both similarities and differences is something that I've really enjoyed over time. And then the other thing is just to realize that one thing about being a scientist that's so amazing is that you're always building a network. So what you will realize as you

30:10move along in life is that as a scientist, you establish connections and those connections will not necessarily be broken the rest of your life if you cherish them and if you fertilize them from time to time. And that's just one of the wonderful things about being a scientist is that there's this connectivity. Absolutely. So do you still keep in touch with people who you may be trained with or have worked with over the years yourself? Absolutely. Oh, so cool. So then Julia, in your particular lab, do you have traditions or things that your group does together for fun, maybe outside of the research?

30:43I wish I could say that we have more traditions, but we always have parties, particularly when people are leaving. And with a group that's moderate in size, you know, that happens pretty often. And oftentimes we have parties at my house and we typically play a game of croquet. And I want to say that this tradition is a tradition that we didn't lose despite COVID. So I had a wonderful lab member go back to Thailand where he was from, and we took the croquet set to the university, which has a quad,

31:15and set up a very large socially distanced croquet game. And I think everybody really loved it. And I think it's just going to forever be a tradition in my group. Oh, that is amazing. So I must ask why croquet? Oh, I don't know. It's just a fun game. Pretty much anyone can play croquet. You can play it in teams. It's just a nice thing to do. I love it. Well, I must say, I'm not much of a croquet expert myself. Are you quite good? No. It's a good idea to grow the grass long before you play it. So it's pretty even

31:50for everyone. You've got strategy I'm hearing. Well, Julia, I think this is a wonderful tradition and a great way to get the group outside, get people together and moving around and having fun outside of the lab. I think that's so important for building camaraderie and kind of deepening those relationships, those connections with the people in your network, because you are tackling some tough and important questions with the work that you're doing. And I know there are barriers, there are challenges in science. We touched on some of them today. But if we took away all of those barriers and we gave you all of the things

32:21you could possibly dream of, whether it's funding, staff, technology, more people, more time, whatever you need, what is the one question, Julia, that you would most want to answer?

Future goals and final advice

32:31The challenge that I'd like to overcome is really developing a solution to flooding of young may seedlings or young soy bean seedlings. I think that this would really have a large impact. Understanding how to do this in a corn plant would translate very easily to a number of other species such as wheat. And I think that this is something that it's possible to do. There are certain technological challenges. And I think that's one reason why it's not an easy goal to attain.

33:04But I think it's certainly feasible. And I would love to have the opportunity to really just focus on that research question. At the same time, in terms of research questions like that question, I also like to think about sort of take your question and just flip it over. And that is, if you didn't have funding, what would you do? I like that question too. To me, that's also an important question. And I would say if I didn't have funding, what I would do would be to work with undergraduate students so that they could develop the knowledge

33:40and the ability to develop computational pipelines that would allow them to explore existing data sets. There's been a complete genomics revolution and my lab in particular has developed a lot of data. So there's tremendous opportunity to explore these data sets to a far greater extent than what we already do. And if we went through a period of not enough money and did these intellectual exercises and then had just an abundance of funding, I think we'd even be in a

34:13better place to address the question that I mentioned. I think that it's really also important to think about what would you do if you don't have that ability. This pandemic and not having the ability to work in the lab to the extent that we're accustomed to also has made me really think about what we would do just behind a computer and with undergraduates, because right now they can't come into our labs and do the research that they were doing before. So that's not the answer you were

34:45necessarily looking for, but it's just sort of where my mind is at the moment. Certainly. I think it's an even better answer. And I think so important, as you mentioned, not just because of the pandemic situation, but just the funding situation in general is very difficult these days. So kind of having these backup plans or ideas in your mind of what are some low cost or no cost research questions or sort of research lines that you could pursue, I think is really smart. Yeah, I think it's important. Definitely. Well, Julia, thank you for sharing all of these insights with us today. You've given me and our listeners a lot to ponder, but I'd love to end

35:18with advice. So when you think back on your own career and the wonderful people you've encountered, is there a particular piece of advice that someone gave you that really helped you that you can pay forward to all of us today? Yes, I think the best advice is to really think through things before you act. It's very important to really have an idea about a hypothesis that you're going to address or even a technology that you're going to develop and really formulate what you're going to do and have some sense of what the challenges are before you actually embark on the exercise.

35:53I think that's great advice. I think kind of taking a moment to take a step back to do the planning can save you a lot of pain in the long run. Absolutely. Well, great advice for our listeners. Julia, is there any other last piece of advice or a last message of inspiration that you want to leave us all with at the end of our conversation today? I would just say it's always nice to reflect on the quote that I mentioned in wilderness is the preservation of the world. Nature is really something that's critically important to us and taking care of our climate and being proactive to deal with climate change is definitely the most

36:27important thing that we can do for mankind and the future. Well, wonderful note to end on, Julia. Thank you again so much for sharing all of these stories and insights. If our listeners are intrigued and they want to learn more about you and your work, what is the best way for them to do so? Well, my group has a website and it's Bailey Saris Lab. So my last name, just the two parts of it run together, baileysarislab.org. They can go there and find out about the research that we're doing and also find links to the graduate training program

36:59that's called Plants 3D that I'm directing now at UCR. Oh, phenomenal. Well, listeners, definitely check out that website. Get in touch with Julia if you have any questions. And Julia, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you on the show today. My pleasure to talk to you. And listeners, great to have you here as well. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.