Ask a Plant Scientist: Ivan Baxter, Ph.D.

Q: How does working for both the USDA-ARS and the Danforth Center tie in with your research?
A: The mission of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the principal in-house research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, is to conduct research to develop and transfer solutions to agricultural problems of high national priority. ARS research focuses on solving problems affecting Americans every day. There’s a lot of overlap of the Danforth Center’s mission and the USDA’s mission when it comes to plant science.

One of the things the USDA does is co-locate USDA researchers with other USDA researchers, typically at land grant universities, which makes us really unique, being here at the Danforth Center. The USDA rents space at the Danforth Center for two USDA scientists and then we each have our own individual lab’s and staff members, my lab consists of one full-time USDA technician, two postdocs, one full-time Danforth Center technician, and two part-time Danforth Center technicians as well as a number of interns. The USDA funds each of us as well as technicians to do our research and we also have adjunct status at the Danforth Center which allows a variety of collaboration with Danforth Center Principal Investigators.

Q: What is your professional background with both organizations over the years?
A: I started my career at the Danforth Center in 2009 under the USDA affiliation. There are three members of our USDA-ARS unit working here, the rest are located at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Q: What are some of the benefits of being a USDA-ARS research scientist located at the Danforth Center?
A: There are a lot of advantages to be being both USDA-ARS and a member of the Danforth Center faculty. The USDA provides a base of funds for research, then, because of our location, we have access to the Center’s amazing state-of-the-art facilities, resources and intellectual partners that are located here.

Q: In a nutshell, how do you describe your daily research?
A: My lab is trying to understand how plants, mainly corn and soybean, take up elements from the environment, such as iron, magnesium, calcium and phosphorous. We then use that knowledge to learn how plants are adapting to their soil environment. We mainly use ionomics, which is high throughput elemental profiling of seeds. We’ve set up a system that enables us to analyze over 1,700 seeds a week, which allows us to do complex experiments that examine genetic interactions with environment.  We are trying to identify genes  that will allow plants to grow on marginal soils with fewer fertilizer inputs.

Q: Why study corn and soybeans over other crops?
A: Soybeans are the primary organism to study for USDA researchers here at the Center. I also have a project working with maize. We focus on those two specifically because they are the two most commonly grown crops in the United States.

Q: How has plant science evolved in the past 10 years?
A: New and improved technologies have given us the ability to conduct experiments more quickly and at lower costs, which allows us to take advantage of the explosion in sequencing and genotyping that enables us to do experiments that couldn’t have been imagined 10 years ago.

Q: Are there any new or exciting technologies or directions your area of expertise is moving towards?
A: We’ve refined and improved the way we conduct experiments but we’re most excited about utilizing the Center’s new Bellwether Foundation Phenotyping Facility. The phenotyping system will add a new dimension that we’ve never had before. We will be able to image plants regularly and know many more things about how and when they grow in response to changes in their environment. In turn, that will give us a lot more information to interpret the elemental signals that we measure on our pipeline. 

Q: What exciting results or partnerships are you looking forward to? 
A: Right now, my lab is collaborating with a lab in Minnesota and another USDA lab in Ithaca, New York. They have a lot of experience with building gene networks and maize genetics that are important components to our project. Also, a large number of maize genetics researchers are working on similar populations so there’s a lot of integration with their results that we are evaluating. 

Q: What is your impression of St. Louis and the Danforth Center since coming here in 2009?
A: There’s a lot of excitement right now surrounding plant science in St. Louis, especially with the Danforth Center’s plans for expansion. My family has loved living in St. Louis; it’s a really great town to raise a family in. We spend a lot of time at the monkey house at the Zoo.  

Q: Regarding your research, what would be the next step to take from here?
A: We need to focus on ways to do our experiments in other environments with different soil and weather conditions. Right now we are able to do standard types of experiments in only 5-10 different environments, but we are focusing on doing those experiments in dozens to hundreds of different environments so we can be knowledgeable of all of the different environmental variables that effect plant growth. It’s very hard to extrapolate from only a few environmental experiments, what the reaction is going to be in all different types of environments. We need more data and need to understand how the genetics are responding to those factors.

Q: What inspired/motivating moment that guided you in to the field of science
A: After taking freshman chemistry, it all sort of came together. I started realizing all of the cool things about science and from there, it just sort of took off.

To learn more, please join Ivan Baxter, USDA-ARS Research Scientist, Assistant Member and Principal Investigator at the Danforth Plant Science Center and Chris Correa, Director, Baseball Development for the St. Louis Cardinals as they discuss the impact these new technologies will have across diverse industries at the Danforth Center's Conversations program on November 14, 2013. For more information and to register, click here.

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