Identifying New Plants, And The Scientific Secrets Of Superfoods

Scientists at the Missouri Botanical Garden are preserving diverse plant species. And, how micronutrients could help address world hunger.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:14Flora Lichtman?

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• 1:54Flora Lichtman?

  Hi, this is Flora Lixman. You're listening to Science Friday.

• 2:01Flora Lichtman?

  SciFry just got back from Columbia, Missouri, where we did a live show with the radio station, KBIA. So today, we are bringing you to Mizzou's Jesse Auditorium to dig into the wild world of plants. From the microscopic nutrients they pack, to the quest to identify every single plant that lives on planet Earth.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  To figure out how our world works, we need to know what these are and where they live.

• 2:27Flora Lichtman?

  One of the great mysteries of our planet is simply what lives here. It's a deceptively simple question, and it's the life's work of my next two guests. They've spent their careers in the field looking for new plant species. If botanical work conjures up an image of someone in a wide-brimmed hat with gardening gloves and a spade, think again. What this work actually requires is helicoptering into remote nooks of the Amazon, hiking through rough terrain, looking for strange fruits and flowers, climbing trees to pluck specimens from branches. And that's just step one. Then there's all the science required

• 3:10Flora Lichtman?

  to identify, classify, and codify those species, which my next guests do at one of the largest repositories of plant information in the world, the Missouri Botanical Garden.

• 3:28Flora Lichtman?

  Here to tell us more about this work and why it's important is Dr. Lucia Lohman, professor at Washington University in St. Louis and president and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. She is the first woman to hold the post.

• 3:46Flora Lichtman?

  We also have Dr. Charlotte Taylor, botanist and senior curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, who was recently named the Most Prolific Woman Author of New Plant Species Living Today.

• 4:04Flora Lichtman?

  So we have some living legends with us. Thank you both for being here and welcome to Science Friday.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 4:11Flora Lichtman?

  So you're both in the taxonomy business, finding and naming species. Lucia, why is it important to give plants names?

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Well, if we think about it, imagine if we don't know the names of different species, we can't even know what they are, right? So I always say that knowing the names of plants is the first step for conservation, for studying them, in the same way that knowing how to read is the first step for education.

• 4:43Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, Charlotte, you've named more species than any other living woman.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Living.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Living. Keep that in mind.

• 4:51Flora Lichtman?

  Well, even so, it's pretty cool. What's your perspective on this question?

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Once we have the name of a species and know what it is, it's an index to everything we know about it. Everything everyone studies about the chemistry, the pollinators, the conservation, it's all linked to that name.

• 5:11Flora Lichtman?

  You need to name it to know it.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 5:13Flora Lichtman?

  Lucia, you've studied the Amazon Basin for most of your career. Why there?

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Well, if we think about it, the Amazon Basin is like the most species-rich biome in the world. And if you go there, you would instantly understand why.

• 5:31Flora Lichtman?

  Tell us about it, yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  You walk around and every day you see a different fruit, a different flower, and all kinds of things, and imagining that plants are really the foundation. They are the reason why we exist. Without plants, we don't have oxygen and we don't exist.

• 5:50Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, when you say it's biodiverse, how does it compare, you know, species-wise to a place like Missouri?

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Well, so if we think about plants, the Amazon Basin, we imagine that we have around 40,000 species. In one hectare of Amazon rainforest, we have more species of plants than we have throughout Europe, for example.

• 6:15Flora Lichtman?

  In one hectare, which is how big is that?

• 6:17Speaker 05

  100 by 100 meters.

• 6:19Flora Lichtman?

  100 by 100 meters, more species of plants in the Amazon than in Europe?

• 6:23Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 6:25Flora Lichtman?

  That's amazing.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  And not just plants. I mean, it's like millions of species of insects and 1,300 species of birds, 3,000 species of fish. So, really, high biodiversity, every organism you look at.

• 6:40Flora Lichtman?

  Why? Why is that true there?

• 6:43Speaker 05

  That's the million-dollar question. And that's exactly what I've been studying during the past few years. So, we really, in order to understand this huge puzzle of how did this high species diversity emerge in one particular region, what we do is to go out in the forest, to catalog the species, and then we build evolutionary trees that are essentially like genealogies. And then we use that information to combine with the geological history of the region to then really recover the patterns and the processes that led to this high species diversity. And so in the Amazon, one key driver is, for

• 7:23Speaker 05

  example, the river drainage. So, if we think about like how these species formed, right? So you have one population. At one point, you have some kind of separation, sometimes could be a mountain range. Two populations are separated. They start to accumulate differences over time, and then you have two species. So in the Amazon basin, you have lots of rivers that separate populations that lead to high species diversity.

• 7:52Flora Lichtman?

  I want to hear a little bit about how you both got into this field. Charlotte, let's start with you. Where did your interest in plants begin?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Well, I grew up in a family with some people who discovered amateur birding and got into it. And they took us with them, whether we wanted to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning or no. We went along with them. And we grew up looking at nature. And also, I grew up in a somewhat rural area, so we were outdoors all the time. Everyone in my town and the area was outdoors all the time, and it just seemed natural. And you paid attention to the world around you. And I love plants. I found a passion for them, and you don't have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning.

• 8:38Flora Lichtman?

  That's a good reason. What about you Lucia?

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Well, also since I was a child, so I was born and raised in Brazil and I was surrounded by biodiversity. And it's kind of funny because when I think about going out and playing with my friends, it always involved plants. And so I started to just pay more attention to grow my own plants and eventually became a career.

• 9:05Flora Lichtman?

  And you have some botany in your family history, right?

• 9:10Speaker 05

  Well, my great-great-grandfather, he was a chemist actually, but he became the director of a botanical garden in Indonesia, which was really kind of fun.

• 9:23Flora Lichtman?

  Amazing.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:25Flora Lichtman?

  I would love to go in the field with you. I wonder, can you give us a little bit of a flavor of what that's like? Like, how you get there and what a day is like?

• 9:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's different types of fieldwork. Some of the most pristine places that we go, sometimes you have to hike mountains to get there or take boats for days to get to particular places where we want to collect. And in the past years, we've really been trying to go to places that nobody had collected before, so we really bring new biodiversity. And a day in a field is essentially, we wake up really early in the morning and we get all our materials ready and we start to walk in the forest and looking for plants that have flowers and fruits. And sometimes they're very high up in the canopy, so that entails climbing up 50-meter

• 10:16Speaker 05

  trees to collect them and bring the flowers and fruits down. So essentially, we go out and we grab little branches of different species and we press them in newspaper. And then we put them in a plant press. This is our 1600s technology that we still use to make dried plant specimens.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  We write all kinds of information. The color of the flowers, where did we collect, the conditions and so forth. And then we smash them. And we later bring them back into the museum and we dry them and keep them. So this way, our museums have species from all over the world.

• 11:00Flora Lichtman?

  Charlotte, how do you know what to pick? I mean, if you have all of these different species around you, how do you know which ones to bring back?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  If I go out in Missouri or the Gulf Coast of America, I would pick something I didn't recognize or something that looked interesting that I wanted to study. When I go to the Amazon, I don't know what anything is, so I just take one of everything. And what... It works. And what we do is we bring it back in big boxes and then we spend about two years figuring out what it is. And that's what the Missouri Botanical Gardens Research Facility is for. We have reference specimens. We have the library. We have Internet access. And we have visitors who come through all year from all over the world. And each one of us knows a tiny little portion of biodiversity.

• 11:48Flora Lichtman?

  Why does it take two years?

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Because there's a lot of plants and no one knows what they are. Because there's a certain entry point where you have to figure out where to start identifying a plant. We put them in families and we put them in genera. But when you get down to the level of species, in order to find what it is, you have to either match it up with something else, which is not always easy. Or if it's new, then you have a real project. And in the Amazon, a lot of them are new, but to just figure it out, you have to eliminate every other possibility. So it's like you prove a negative, but it takes a lot of time.

• 12:29Flora Lichtman?

  So, you know, I want to talk a little bit more about why it's important to catalog all of this biodiversity. Where does this take us?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  I started out as an ecologist. My idea was to study how a community was put together and what plants live there and why some are successful. And then I discovered that no one could identify half of them. So how can you say what grows there if you don't know? And so I started working back and back to identify stuff. And when I put a name on something, then observations from forestry, from chemistry, get connected. And the next important step is then you can use it to restore... Damaged ecosystems because you know what lives there.

• 13:12Speaker 05

  One thing that people don't usually realize is that there's still lots of species out there that we don't even know their names. So for the Amazon Basin, for example, we estimate that only 10% of the species have been named.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  10%?

• 13:28Speaker 05

  So 90% of the species, we don't even know what their names are. Every single trip I do to the Amazon, we come back with dozens of new species.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Really?

• 13:39Speaker 05

  And if we think about, so overall, we have 350,000 of andro sperm species, so flowering plants that have been named, and lots more still to be described. And for other organisms like fungi, for example, we estimate that we're probably going to need 1,000 years to describe all the species that are out there. So for fungi, it's even, I think, only maybe 5% of the species have been described.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  But to figure out how our world works, we need to know what these are and where they live.

• 14:13Flora Lichtman?

  I love it. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's go to the audience, right here. Do you have a question?

• 14:20Speaker 06

  I'd love to hear a little bit more about the social and cultural interactions that you have when you go out into the field, particularly given that people are living in these spaces. So what does knowledge exchange look like in these fields?

• 14:32Speaker 05

  That's such a fantastic question. And I feel like every time I go into the field and I meet people from the local communities and so forth, I always feel it's such a lesson of humility. Because we've been doing masters, PhDs, postdocs, and studying the plants, and then you get there, and you realize you don't know anything. Like, the local communities, they really have such a deep understanding, not just the names, and these are the names they give to those plants, but their uses, their properties, how they grow, and all kinds of things. So we learn a lot from them.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  And we try to give back as well. The local communities are always involved in our projects. They're always go with us, and we leave behind what we can, depending on what they want. They don't always want specimens or something.

• 15:25Flora Lichtman?

  I was going to ask about that because I know in paleontology, you know, that field's changed a lot. Where now, people do not go to other countries and bring back bones, right? But that's how it used to be. How do you think about that now in botany? I mean, dinosaur bones obviously different from a botanical specimen, but I'm wondering if that thinking has evolved in botany too?

• 15:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, things have changed. And it's true, in the past, people used to come, collect specimens. And in the past, there were no herbaria in a lot of the countries where people used to go collecting. And so nowadays, what we do is always the exchange and always making the information available to everyone. So for example, right now, at the Missouri Botanical Garden, we are starting a project to digitize our 8 million specimens that will be freely distributed to everyone. And we really want to make the information available in formats that is just not for scientists, but anybody interested in plants, they can take most advantage of the information.

• 16:29Flora Lichtman?

  Let's go back to the audience over here. Do you have a question?

• 16:32Speaker 07

  We're talking about the canopy in the Amazon. So are there different plants at different levels? Do you have to keep looking for different plants depending upon whether they're at the top or near the ground?

• 16:41Speaker 05

  Excellent question. And so, I actually, well, the way we botanists divide our work, we have a family that is our favorite, right? And my family- A group of species. Exactly. So a family of plants that usually, 1,000 or 2,000 species. The family that I work on, my group of plants, they actually grow in the canopy. So they are climbing plants, and you only find them in the canopy. In the Amazon basin, the river can change 30 meters. So we try to go, when the river is high up, and then you just go in a little boat, and then you just grab those species without having to climb.

• 17:23Flora Lichtman?

  Sure. Sure. Go ahead. You have a question over here? What's your favorite plant you've ever cataloged?

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Ooh. That's-

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Well, I can give some examples and be here all night, but I'm going to say that finding an undescribed species, a new species and naming it, is like your kids. So that's like asking, "Which is your favorite kid?" You can't really say, "Which is your favorite." Some of them are prettier than others. Some of them, you know, are kind of more interesting than others. But I like all of them.

• 18:01Flora Lichtman?

  Before we wrap up, is there one thing you want the audience to take away? You know, when they think about plants, what should they think?

• 18:08Speaker 05

  Well, the first thing is really, plants are the foundation, really. And just keep in mind, the medicines, the clothing, and everything we do. And try to learn names of plants. It's really kind of amazing. If you learn the names of five different species, you will walk around, and again, it's like your friends. You're going to see them and see what your friends have to offer, flowers and fruits, and it will really change your life. If you try a few each week, you will see the result.

• 18:40Flora Lichtman?

  Charlotte?

• 18:41Speaker 04

  I would say that I think that a scientific cataloguing is really dull and is considered unexciting, but it's the basis for everything. And what you don't see up here with the two of us sitting is that this is a team activity. We are not here on our own. We did not get here on our own. We are here because of all of our colleagues in different countries and a whole lot of interested amateurs. And don't assume that you can't be as interested in plants and as good as we are.

• 19:14Flora Lichtman?

  I'm just going to just quibble with one thing. It's not dull. It's definitely not dull. Would you guys agree?

• 19:22Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Lucia Lowman, professor at Washington University in St. Louis and president and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Dr. Charlotte Taylor, botanist and senior curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Thank you both for coming on the show today.

• 19:37Flora Lichtman?

  After the break, what are micronutrients and why do they matter?

• 19:42Speaker 08

  Hidden hunger is due to people might consume food that are calorific dense, but they are missing the required vitamins and minerals.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Science Friday is supported by PBS, presenting Going Wild. If you love learning about the natural world and meeting the scientists who help us understand it, be sure to check out the new season of Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn Grant. It's the chart-topping and Webby Award-winning podcast from the folks at Nature on PBS, now with a video companion series. In this season of Going Wild, host acclaimed wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynn Grant heads out into the field to explore the animals, people, and stories that make nature worth saving. Stops include a hibernating black bear den in Arkansas and an underwater shipwreck site off the Florida coast. If you're looking for a place to start, check out the season's debut episode, where Ray joins beloved biologist and influencer Jordan King in the Florida Everglades

• 20:38Speaker 00

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• 20:52Speaker 09

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• 21:01Flora Lichtman?

  We are constantly hearing about the latest, greatest superfood. Goji berries, acai, quinoa. But what does it mean to be a superfood? Is there any science to it? My next guest puts food under a microscope, literally. She studies the nutrients, the microscopic molecules that help make our bodies function. And she's trying to harness them to fight hunger worldwide. Dr. Kiruba Krishnaswamy is an assistant professor in the Colleges of Engineering and Agriculture at the University of Missouri, and she's based right here in Columbia. Please welcome her to the show.

• 21:43Flora Lichtman?

  Welcome to Science Friday.

• 21:47Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, is there any science to this idea of superfoods? Are there foods that have more going on nutritionally than other foods?

• 21:56Speaker 08

  There are some foods that inherently have health benefits, like immune-boosting properties, brain development, antioxidant properties. They could be high in vitamins and minerals. So, these foods can be categorized as superfoods. For example, elderberries. They have those polyphenolic compounds, antioxidant property, that gave those immune-boosting properties.

• 22:21Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so you study micronutrients. What is a micronutrient? And how's it different from like, a regular old nutrient?

• 22:30Speaker 08

  So, when we talk about nutrients, we talk about macronutrients and micronutrients. So, imagine a puzzle of a map. So, we have big pieces and we have small pieces. So, big pieces like proteins, carbohydrates, fats. And small pieces like vitamins and minerals. So, when you're putting this map together, we need to have both the big pieces and the small pieces together. If even a small amount of these micronutrients are missing, then the body might not be able to metabolize the larger pieces, like the proteins and so on.

• 23:10Flora Lichtman?

  Do we typically get enough micronutrients in our diet?

• 23:15Speaker 08

  No.

• 23:15Flora Lichtman?

  No?

• 23:19Speaker 08

  So, dietary diversification is when we are able to consume a diverse variety of fruits, and vegetables, and foods. But, how many of us can say that we can have a balanced diet every day?

• 23:34Flora Lichtman?

  I eat only cheese, so I cannot.

• 23:38Speaker 08

  So same, right? It's difficult to have a diverse diet every day. And that's where supplements come into play. So most of us might take vitamin supplements and so on. And that gives the required micronutrients. On the other hand, we could fortify them with foods that we commonly use, like the bread is fortified with folic acid and B complex, like the milk is fortified with vitamin A, vitamin D. Salt that we consume is iodized. So we can fortify them. So when we consume them, we get the required micronutrients.

• 24:17Flora Lichtman?

  Is there a food that has a lot of micronutrients that you feel like is underrepresented in people's diets? Like, you know, a superfood you'd like to see go viral?

• 24:27Speaker 08

  So one food that I really like is millet. Is because millet, these are ancient grains. And when we talk about millet, we always think it grows in Asia and Africa. But I was surprised to see that it also grows in the Midwest. It's sometimes called milo. It's drought tolerant. And it's also nutritious because it has high fiber, high vitamins, minerals, and a good amino acid profile. So that's one food I feel like it needs to come back.

• 25:00Flora Lichtman?

  I read that 2023 was the year of the millet, which I can't believe I didn't celebrate. And I feel like I missed out. Did you celebrate?

• 25:09Speaker 08

  Yes, we did celebrate. And Mizu hosted a webinar series throughout the year for expanding millet.

• 25:22Flora Lichtman?

  You celebrated with a webinar?

• 25:23Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 25:26Flora Lichtman?

  So I heard your lab was the first to get images of millet under an electron microscope. Is that right?

• 25:32Speaker 08

  Yes, we were the first research group to put these millet under the microscope to see their structures. When we look at the millet, they all look small.

• 25:42Flora Lichtman?

  They're small, but they're different. Like, some are green, some are sort of a deep purply-red, others are a little bit bigger.

• 25:50Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 25:51Flora Lichtman?

  And they're beautiful to look at.

• 25:52Speaker 08

  True.

• 25:53Flora Lichtman?

  If you have a question for Kyuruba, please come up to the mics and we will get to you shortly. So I understand that you worked on a way to use millet to add micronutrients to our diet and also tackle food waste, I think. Will you tell us about this project?

• 26:08Speaker 08

  So when this particular project came to us, it's a Greek yogurt processing. For every one cup of Greek yogurt, we generate three cups of waste. And this waste is high in calcium and so on. It's currently distributed down the drain, used as a fertilizer. It causes an environmental problem, algal bloom and so on. So when we got this challenge from the industry, how do we address this food industry waste? We thought, okay, we have some unexplored millet. Why don't we combine them? And we could formulate it in our lab and we were able to generate powders that are

• 26:53Speaker 08

  really nutrient-rich.

• 26:55Flora Lichtman?

  And then what do you do with them? Like sprinkle it on popcorn or what happens next?

• 27:00Speaker 08

  So these powders can be used as supplements and they are mineral fortification agents, infant formula development, and they have a multiple application process for this.

• 27:12Flora Lichtman?

  Fascinating. Let's go to the audience. We have a question over here.

• 27:15Speaker 10

  What's the best way for a kid to get micronutrients?

• 27:19Speaker 08

  What's the best way to get micronutrients? Is so when your mom says eat all your greens, just consume them. They are so yummy and they will give you all the required micronutrients so you can become hale and healthy, your brain power, immune system, your physical growth, everything will be strong.

• 27:41Flora Lichtman?

  Do you eat leafy greens?

• 27:43Speaker 10

  I do. I'm really into vegetables and I eat them a lot.

• 27:46Speaker 08

  Good job, yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 10

  Thank you. [applause]

• 27:54Flora Lichtman?

  Go ahead. Another question from the audience.

• 27:56Speaker 11

  Thanks. So my question is, for example, you were mentioning millet. Do you have like a specific cookbook in mind? Or a specific strategy? Or how do you make people consume millet? If they have not never used it before in their kitchens?

• 28:12Speaker 08

  That's a very good question. It's because we could have the product. We could develop these new varieties. But if it's not culturally appropriate, if it's not region-specific, then acceptance of this food will become difficult. Right? So whenever we develop a product, we need to understand the population. What needs are we meeting in that population? So developing it with the people. And that's when we can have products that can be accepted.

• 28:45Flora Lichtman?

  Tell me, are there other foods besides millet's that you're sort of, you know, desperate to see go big?

• 28:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, there's so many foods. We work with pawpaws. Pawpaws are the large...

• 28:57Flora Lichtman?

  Yay! We got a lot of pawpaw fans here.

• 29:00Speaker 08

  So pawpaw is the largest Native American fruit that has tropical flavors growing in temperate regions. And we were able to increase the shelf life of pawpaw fruit from five days to 15 days.

• 29:16Flora Lichtman?

  You know, one of your lab's goals is to tackle global hunger. Why did you decide to go, you know, microscopic to help solve this huge problem?

• 29:29Speaker 08

  So when we talk about hunger, we always talk about chronic hunger. That affects more than 821 million people. So in 21st century, we should not be talking about hunger, but unfortunately, we are.

• 29:45Speaker 08

  And hidden hunger is as dangerous as chronic hunger. It affects more than 2 billion people. That's roughly one-third of the global population.

• 29:56Flora Lichtman?

  Will you define hidden hunger?

• 29:58Speaker 08

  Hidden hunger is due to people might consume food that are calorific dense, but they are missing the required vitamins and minerals. And that can lead to series of health problems from cognitive development, physical development, immune system. So that's why it's called hidden. We assume that we are getting food, but we are missing those key micronutrients that can be an enzyme or a cofactor for other metabolic processes. And whenever we talk about hunger, we always think stunting and wasting. Imagine an umbrella, right? On one side, we have stunting and wasting.

• 30:42Speaker 08

  On the other side, we have overweight and obesity. So all these things fall under the same umbrella. And this is what we call the double burden of malnutrition. So this is on one hand. On the other hand, we waste around 1.3 billion tonnes of edible food annually. That's a lot of food, right? And most of that is fruits and vegetables because they are perishable. Their shelf life is short. And they are the high source of vitamins and minerals too. So if we can come up with solutions that instead of that going as waste, we can recover them.

• 31:27Speaker 08

  Because in nature, there is nothing called waste, right? It's a terminology we humans have created because we don't know how to process it. And why I looked at the micros is because...

• 31:41Speaker 08

  There is no single bullet to solve this complex problem, but everyone can contribute. And we all eat food. Like, it connects us, right? If we can send man to the moon, right? If we can have technologies to send humans to Mars and the scientific advancement, then we can also imagine a world where every child born on this planet can have access to safe, sufficient, and nutritious food.

• 32:19Flora Lichtman?

  I think that's the perfect place to leave it. Kiruba Krishnashwamy, Assistant Professor in the Colleges of Engineering and Agriculture at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Thank you so much for joining us today.

• 32:31Speaker 08

  Thank you, Flora.

• 32:34Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including...

• 32:40Speaker 12

  George Harper. John Dinkowski.

• 32:43Flora Lichtman?

  Annie Nero.

• 32:44Speaker 12

  Jason Rosenberg.

• 32:46Flora Lichtman?

  Rasha Ureidi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.