She's a Scientist: Rebecca Roston

Curt Bright Author

03/19/2021 Added

163 Plays

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Biochemist Rebecca Roston gets under the skin of crop plants to make them more cold-resistant.

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[00:00:00.123](upbeat music)
[00:00:04.480]Farmers in warm southern states enjoy
[00:00:07.090]two growing seasons each year,
[00:00:09.310]but on most of the country's farmland
[00:00:11.300]harvest happens only once.
[00:00:13.770]Ultimately, if we don't find strategies to make more food
[00:00:16.300]on the same land, we're going to have
[00:00:18.090]a food shortage internationally.
[00:00:20.381]Rebecca Roston studies the biochemical changes
[00:00:23.490]in plants when temperatures rise and fall.
[00:00:26.690]Plants adapt biochemically, changing their membranes
[00:00:29.920]so that they become more flexible at lower temperatures
[00:00:33.300]and less flexible at higher temperatures
[00:00:35.630]and they do it really fast.
[00:00:37.260]In Nebraska, we may have a 40-degree difference in one day.
[00:00:41.260]Hey, do you think we should maybe fix this up a little?
[00:00:43.490]So what my lab is trying to do is both investigate
[00:00:46.060]the signals that the membranes are using
[00:00:48.330]and interpreting in order to change
[00:00:50.140]and also to understand the changes that are made.
[00:00:54.210]By improving cold hardiness of some
[00:00:56.100]of our favorite crops like corn and soybean,
[00:00:58.300]we provide a variety of foods year round at higher yields.
[00:01:04.510]As a community college student,
[00:01:06.180]Roston had two majors, biology and art.
[00:01:10.080]I stuck with that for the next two years until I realized
[00:01:12.490]that the art studio classes conflicted too dramatically
[00:01:15.840]with the science lab classes
[00:01:18.390]and I couldn't finish both in four years.
[00:01:20.700]So I chose to stick with the science degree.
[00:01:26.810]Roston credits great mentors
[00:01:28.670]with her success in science.
[00:01:30.400]It also helped that she was naturally curious
[00:01:32.940]and stubborn, a perfect combination for her career.
[00:01:37.470]So you don't have to be the straight-A student.
[00:01:39.460]What you have to be is willing to make mistakes
[00:01:41.890]over and over and over again
[00:01:44.160]as you do something that nobody else has done before,
[00:01:47.830]because it's hard and it stays hard.
[00:01:51.028]And as long as you stay at the front edge of science,
[00:01:54.131]it stays that hard.
[00:01:55.058](upbeat music)

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She's a Scientist: Rebecca Roston

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