The winners of this year’s Three Minute Thesis Competition presented their complicated research in simple, three-minute talks.

Can you scare plants?

The winner of this year’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition posed that question to the audience at the URI Graduate School’s second annual 3MT event. In her winning presentation, Katherine Overstrum explained that based on her research, plants can indeed be scared and could grow differently when they detect the presence of something that could eat them.

Each student who entered was challenged to present the content and contributions of their research in a 3-minute “elevator pitch” intended to capture the attention of a nonspecialist audience in a vivid, cogent, jargon-free style.

“An 80,000-word Ph.D. thesis would take 9 hours to present,” says the University of Queensland, which founded the 3MT competition in 2008, on their website. “Your time limit … 3 minutes.” The competition is now replicated at over 900 universities around the world. The contest tests students’ academic, presentation, and research-communication skills.

—Natalie Lundsteen

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Can you scare plants?

I designed an experiment in which I attempted to scare plants using different pre-attack cues. I treated one group of plants with slime from slugs. I treated a second group of plants with damaged plant material from the same plant species. I treated a third group with both slug slime and damaged plant material. A fourth group of plants was the control group.

Here’s what I found. First, the seedlings treated with both pre-attack cues (i.e., slug slime and damaged plant material from the same species) germinated faster.

Second, all of the adult plants ended up about the same size. Third, herbivores regularly avoided leaves that were treated with both pre-attack cues. Fourth, the plants that were treated with pre-attack cues maintained their defenses through adulthood.

So, you might be wondering, what’s the big takeaway here? It’s that the plants are not passive. When plants are scared, they use the abundant information in the environment around them to make decisions about growing and defending themselves. So, the more information available to them, the better off they’ll be.

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Helping fishers avoid murky water

My research used remote sensing to measure the carbon concentration in coastal water. With remote sensing, satellites are used to take pictures of water. The images are made up of pixels, or tiny squares of colors. The browner the pixel, the more carbon in the water.

By using remote sensing, we could monitor bodies of water up to 60 miles away from the shore.

We looked to see if rainfall impacted the carbon concentration in the water and found that after heavy rain, carbon concentration spikes at the coastline.

In the Bay of Bengal in South Asia, we found that the water begins to brown three to four months after the rainy season. If you’re fishing there, the water might seem normal right after the wet season, but months later, the visibility could drop gradually from carbon build-up.

This type of information could provide an early warning for fishers to avoid fishing on days when the carbon level is high and could also help guide them to clearer water. It could also help coastal communities prepare for changing water conditions.

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The language of chemistry

Nature doesn’t give bacteria the ability to speak or make gestures. However, what nature provides is the language of chemistry; bacteria communicate through the exchange of chemicals.

In a friendly communication, the exchange of chemicals could enable the bacteria to survive in harsh environments. However, when competing for space and nutrients, bacteria tend to release chemicals that are toxic to their neighbors.

My research showed that bacteria cleverly package chemicals in tiny boxes called membrane vesicles. The chemicals in those boxes can kill harmful bacteria, including those that cause infections in humans—even the ones that have shown resistance to antibiotics.

So, the bigger picture: Since bacteria that cause infections in humans only understand the language of chemistry, we can communicate with them by loading the boxes with antibiotics to ensure their efficient delivery.

Perhaps the problem of antibiotic resistance might not only be in the antibiotics being inactive; it could be an inefficiency in their delivery. Bacteria communicate their displeasure with one another using these tiny boxes, so perhaps we can use this to our advantage.

PHOTOS: COURTESY URI GRADUATE SCHOOL