Physics professor Calvin Howell and his students are working with Duke biologists on an interdisciplinary project to discover more about how plants absorb and use carbon dioxide—a question of particular relevance as levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere continue to climb. Howell and his colleagues use positron emission tomography (PET) to track molecules of carbon dioxide—tagged with radioisotopes—as they are absorbed by leaves.
Howell, director of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) which is housed at Duke, says, “Physics brings two types of perspectives to the project. One is the experimental techniques intrinsic to nuclear physics. The other thing I hope physics will bring is an analytical and quantitative approach for modeling plants,” particularly biological processes involving the plant and the environment. PET has long been used in medicine, but its use with plants is relatively new. One of the advantages of PET is that it provides “movies” of biological processes rather than the “still” images of an X-ray or CAT scan that show mostly structural details. Howell and graduate student Matt Kiser, PhD ’08, worked closely with Duke biologist Chantal Reid to set up a system using the resources of TUNL and the Phytotron—a controlled-environment facility for plant research.
Mary-Russell Roberson is a freelance science writer who lives in Durham.