The Ultimate Trivia Super (UTS) Challenge with Annie McDonald
Hi everyone. I'm Annie and I'm a student/researcher here at UTS. Does anyone grow their own vegetables at home? Fruits, herbs, Yeah? Do you guys ever think about what you might be eating in terms of contamination when you consume your own home grown produce? Well that's sort of what my research touches on. I'm part of the phyto here and we specialize in phyto remediation phyto means plant and phytoremediation is just a fancy way of saying using plants to suck up contamination from soils water or air.
So this might ring true to some of you. When I was at school I had no clue what I wanted to do after all. And then I got to undergrad and I went through that and I still didn't know what I wanted to do after until the very end, when in class we got to do our own phytoremediation experiment and I got to grow my own sunflower seedlings in crude oil contaminated soil and my sunflowers didn't die. So I thought well this is pretty darn thrifty science right using nature to literally clean up the earth. This is something I could get on board with. So that's what leads me to my current project and I'm investigating edible phytoremediators. That's me up in the UTS greenhouse last week growing my juicy mulberries which I'm going to be using in my main experiment. So I'm combining various edible fruits and herbs and vegetables together into mini gardens, kind of like what you guys would have at home. But I'm spiking the soils with heavy metals, so copper, zinc and lead. Then there's this whizzbang machine in the lab that can analyse and tell me how much of which metal has accumulated up into the edible tissues of my plants. So and on the side I'm doing a germination test with using the same species but with seeds in spiked agar jelly so I have about 150 petri dishes at the moment with over 1500 seeds and growing, I've still got to make more. So that's sort of the crux of my science when I'm not doing science I'm composing songs on this bad boy. You guys were probably wondering why I had a ukulele. I bought my first ukulele when I was in year 10 to learn off paired up with two girlfriends and we formed a group called the Ukeladies. Our band had a pretty short shelf life. We had a total of three YouTube videos and one paid gig. It was short but sweet. Anyway these days I just write quirky little tunes and I'm going to play you one now. It's a song about my lab the phyto lab. It's sort of, it's written as a theme song you know, just in case the ABC ever rang up and said hey we're doing a miniseries on your plant science. But until then you guys get to hear the preview of the theme song.
(Annie playing Ukelele and Singing)
Technological advancement just generated a heck ton of waste. Consequently there are toxic heavy metals just lying around the place. Ah, who’s going to come up with the tools to bioremediate? Phytolab at UTS! We're kind of badass environmentalists, solving problems, using plants to phytoremediate contaminated lands, contaminated lands. Plants detect issues they can hyper accumulate metals into tissues are Australian species better at it making their application easy microwave plasma, atomic emission spectrometry is a fancy way of precision measurement of metals into plant parts, stem, leaves, roots or aerials, aerials. Phytolab at UTS, run by Dr Meagan Philips. Tight science full cost effective environmental alternatives, alternatives. Phytolab. (Ukelele strumming)
Thank you. Applause.
6 September 2018
Annie McDonald is cleaning up our soil with plants! See her at the Phyto Lab, where she’s testing out just how strong some of our leafy greens can be in soil contaminated with heavy metals. We hear that she’s talented on a different scale!
UTS Science in Focus is a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers.