Sigma BioBlogs

Sarah Wyatt and I have something in common.  Everyone from our sleepy  little towns  thought we were smart enough to be a doctor or a nurse.  Now they just shake their heads, as she is a gravitational biologist who has studied plants for NASA, and I get to interview her and then post it to “the internets”.

Sarah grew up a farm girl in Western Kentucky.  She always loved nature, climbing trees and pitching in to help run the family farm (Here’s where our stories diverge..  I did the cooking, fed the family and the cuter animals)

While in college she met Joe Kuc, who was studying signal transduction in plants. Impressed with his approach, she adopted some of his philosophies into her own teaching style.  This includes the allocation of her time as follows:

1. 20% Outreach to the community
2. 40% Research
3. 40% Teaching

After receiving her PhD, she did a post-doc with with NASA researchers at  NC State as part of NSCORT The NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training. There she studied the effect of gravity on plant growth, and has been studying it ever since. For Sarah, the real fascination lies with the fact that  plant life has intelligence independent of a nervous system used to relay external signals from the environment..

She believes that plants might be the highest life form on earth…if you challenge that point she will let you know about totipotency…the plant cell’s ability to differentiate…then undifferentiate, assuming an entirely new role.

This post brought to you by Sigma Life Science Plant biotech products