Medford Lab Featured on NOVA
Our lab was featured on the NOVA episode Making Stuff: Safer on November 6th, 2013. Host David Pogue and his film crew spent a day in the lab, learning about our plant sentinel technology and how it could be used to improve safety in places like airports.
The entire episode can be viewed on the PBS website here.
David Pogue, the host of the NOVA/PBS Making Stuff series, interviews Dr. June Medford in her lab on the Colorado State University campus. Medford’s plant sentinel program, which is being funded by DTRA and DHS, was featured on a 2013 episode titled Making Stuff: Safer. (DoD photo by Lynda Yezzi)
Dr. Nikolai Braun, a biophysics researcher, jokingly shows the “two-fisted television approach” to science. Braun is on of about 30 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at CSU working on the plant sentinel program. (DoD photo by Lynda Yezzi)
See more great photos from that day on the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Facebook page!
Lab Develops Plant Sentinels
January 26, 2011 – Professor June Medford in the Department of Biology and her team enabled a computer-designed detection trait to work in a plant by rewiring the plant’s natural signaling process so that a detection incident produces loss of green color. This work – an important step in a long process – could eventually be used for a wide range of applications such as security in airports or monitoring for pollutants such as radon in a basement. MORE
…Read the paper in PloS ONE
…Plant Sentinel: The Movie!
…Video: Colorado State University Biologist Rewires Plants to Detect Pollutants, Explosives
Prototype Plant Sentinels
Illustration of Plant Sentinel Concept
