Living bio-factories
The Sainsbury Laboratory is located within the 16-hectare grounds of the Botanic Garden in central Cambridge, home to a living collection of 8,000 cultivated plant species - including 14,000 individual accessions, which are separate samples of the same species collected from different parts of the world to capture the species’ diversity.
While tropical rainforests are often talked about as being rich sources of undiscovered pharmaceuticals, alpine plants growing in the harsh mountainous regions of the world could also be a source of potential new medicines and biomaterials.
The Botanic Garden has more than 2,000 species from the alpine and rocky regions of the world in its collection - and this is where Wightman's collaboration began. His focus was on specimens with unusual characteristics that had not received much past scientific attention.
Looking at these alpine plants with advanced imaging and chemical analysis equipment is turning up previously unseen microscopic structures and unusual chemical compounds.
“Alpine plants grow in very harsh conditions at high altitudes above where trees can survive. They can withstand below freezing temperatures, high winds, low humidity and high UV,” says Paul Aston, the Botanic Garden Alpine and Woodland Supervisor.
“There are many things plants make that we don’t yet know about, and this is especially true for alpine plants – which have many unusual adaptations to the harsh environments they live in.”
Manufacturing rare minerals
The first set of alpine plants to be studied were from the CUBG’s national collection of European Saxifraga species, where the researchers found a rare and useful mineral called vaterite coating their leaves.
Researchers talk about their discovery of vaterite coating the leaves of Saxifraga
“Vaterite is an unstable form of calcium carbonate, and in high humidity it usually transforms into more common forms of calcium carbonate like calcite,” says Wightman. “As such, vaterite is rarely found on Earth and is more likely to be found in outer-space on meteorites. Small amounts of vaterite crystals have been found in some sea and freshwater crustaceans, bird eggs and the inner ears of salmon. And now we’ve found it in large concentrations on these alpine plants.”
This discovery is of interest to pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries as vaterite has a number of applications in medicine and printing, but is challenging to manufacture. Saxifraga plants might hold some secrets on how to manufacture vaterite and maintain its stability.y.
Microscopy examination of Saxifraga plants also turned up some novel cell structures. “Saxifraga scardica has a special tissue surrounding the leaf edge that appears to deflect light from the edge into the leaf,” says Wightman. “The cells appear to be producing novel cell wall structures to achieve this deflection. This may be to help the plant collect more light, particularly if it is growing in partly shaded environments.”
Novel cell wall structures in Saxifraga
Novel cell wall structures in Saxifraga
The team believes the novel cell wall structures of Saxifrages could also one day help inform the manufacture of new bio-inspired optical devices and photonic structures for industry, such as communication cables and fibre optics.
