Nick Talmo is a PhD student in Dr. Ashish Ranjan’s lab in the department of Plant Pathology. He grew up in Edina, Minnesota and is not only the first person to pursue a career in science in his family but will also be the first in his family to obtain a Doctoral degree.
Nick got his bachelor’s degree in biology at Augsburg. Despite knowing that he was interested in plants he didn’t have a clear idea of what he might want to focus on but in a stroke of luck ended up with Dr. Anne Impullitti as his advisor. Dr. Impullitti graduated from the Department of Plant Path at the U and, in a nod to how small the Plant Path world can be, had a committee member when she was a student that is on Nick’s committee now. She gave Nick his first opportunity to experience research as part of an undergrad internship working with fungal endophytes of soybeans. As often happens, this completely unknown field became very compelling as he learned more. He learned to isolate different fungi from stem sections and began working with cultures and found that the interactions of plants and fungi, both beneficial and pathogenic, became a real area of interest for him. While the research internships at Augsburg provided a foray into plant research, the summer he spent working at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center gave him experience with biotech/high scale research that Augsburg, being a small liberal arts school, wasn’t able to provide. His project that summer was working on a transgenic line of Camelina to change the lipid profile of the small oil seed. He spent much of his time running PCRs and Westerns blots. This experience with molecular work helped to refine the direction he would head down the road.
After graduating from Augsburg in 2016 he found a job working in a food safety laboratory testing for foodborne pathogens. The break from school allowed him to save some money, get a break from schooling, and really get clear on what he wanted to do next. The job also gave him some experience with a particular flavor of industry and helped him realize that the conveyor belt type of job wasn’t really the best fit for him. The aspect of the job that did fit him well, though, was the teaching. He found himself in a team lead role that required doing a lot of training which solidified his instinct that teaching was something he wanted to be a part of his future career. Not surprisingly, his role as a TA during his stint in grad school here was incredibly enjoyable and something he would do every semester if he was able.
With grad school in mind but unsure about which department to choose, he got a technician position in George Weiblen’s lab in the College of Biological Sciences. Getting the chance to do work in plant physiology, which he hadn’t done before, really helped him home in on the plan to get a doctorate degree in the Plant Pathology Department, which he joined in the fall of 2021. When he joined the department, his advisor, Dr. Ashish Ranjan, was quite new to the Department himself. When Nick found out that Dr. Ranjan worked on soybeans with a focus on molecular work around plant/pathogen interactions he knew he had found a good fit. Because the lab was brand new, Nick found himself in a position that isn’t very common, that of being the first graduate student in a lab. Some people would shy away from the added challenge of helping to start up a new lab, but Nick found himself excited about the idea of wearing all the different hats that that would require. “That is something I have always done well; figuring things out and keeping busy with lots of different tasks,” he notes. Being at the forefront of starting a new lab was a fun challenge. He credits his interest and proclivity to this type of thing with the culture of his family while he was growing up. “If something broke, we fixed it ourselves. Water heater breaks, we fix it! Shingles on the roof need replacing, we called up a couple uncles and did it together. So, it was kind of fun just getting some of this secondhand equipment up and running again after some maintenance and fixing.”
Since joining the lab, Nick has been focused on trying to optimize protocols to characterize the genes of the phenylpropanoid biosynthesis pathway. It is thought that metabolites in this pathway are involved in resistance to white mold, which is a threat to soybean crop yields in many regions, most notably for us here in Minnesota, the southern portion of the state. One of the metabolites in this pathway that may play a role is salicylic acid, which is a possible signaling hormone for defense response in plants. The pathway also leads to the production of lignins, which play a large role in the structure of plants, and it has been shown that different lignin profiles and percentages can influence disease response in some pathogens. In addition to lignins and salicylic acid, there are a lot of intermediate metabolites that have been shown to be inhibitory to Sclerotinia (white mold) and other pathogens in vitro. So, because there are a lot of potential targets in this particular pathway for improving our understanding of how plants might resist white mold as well as giving us ways to combat the infections, Nick dove in headfirst, hoping to tackle the entire pathway. Unfortunately, he quickly realized that they would need to narrow the scope a bit. The first step in this project of characterizing these genes in the pathway relied upon being able to see which metabolite levels are altered when the plants are challenged with white mold, and in order to do that they decided to use Quantitative PCR, which is a way of seeing how much of a compound is being produced by the plants. The challenge, though, is that each gene has many slightly different copies which have arisen in the model soybean line that they are using. Specific tools have to be developed in order to capture it all. Because of this, the original plan of characterizing all of the genes ballooned from designing tools for a handful or so, to several dozen because of the many slightly different copies that need to be considered. When the team realized that the scope of the project was just not feasible in the time span available, they chose the most promising candidates with which to move forward. They have hopes that after the initial characterizations are complete, they can move into silencing the genes and finally making suggestions to Bob Stupar’s lab about options for CRISPR editing of the soybeans to create crops with improved resistance to white mold.
Another project that has been taking up his time has been a joint project with Aaron Lorenz’s breeding group. Nick has been screening some of the University of Minnesota developed lines for susceptibility to white mold to influence which lines are chosen to go forward in the breeding work. Additionally, he has been working on screening some industry lines to verify if they perform as well against white mold as advertised, which isn’t always the case. A unique aspect of the screening that they are doing is that they are not only using controlled greenhouse conditions but also running trials in a plot in Wells, MN, which historically has high levels of white mold. Having both of these growing conditions will flesh out the results and make them more reliable. Getting these comprehensive results, though, requires them wrestling with the farmer’s foe/friend, the weather. The trials they ran in the growing season of 2023 resulted in zero infected plants: owing to the prolonged and severe lack of moisture. “I guess we figured out the solution for the disease; just have it not rain for a month and a half because there was no disease whatsoever,” he noted wryly.
While there is much work ahead of him still to complete his project, he has been paving a road to travel and is reaching the point where he will be able to start moving things forward at an accelerated pace because of all the groundwork he has already laid. Thinking about where his work is headed, he says, “I think it ends up being a cool study, having both field and growth chamber data, since people usually do one or the other. And the extra fun part then is that we will have the molecular side of it too.”
