Angela Moles - vines research

- Video interview here (mpeg, 12.1MB)/ Audio here (mp3, 2MB)

- View images here

Australian researchers have found that 92% of vines twist anti-clockwise—regardless of their location north or south of the equator.

The work, announced today at the L’Oréal For Women in Science Fellowship ceremony in Melbourne, is a small part of a vast body of work to understand how plants around the world vary and adapt to climate.

2008 L'Oréal Fellow Angela Moles visited 75 study sites in two years. At each site—in Zambia, China, Peru, Israel, Patagonia, Alaska, Congo, Australia and elsewhere—she and her international team of scientists observed and measured everything they could.

Now Angela and her colleagues are mining the information they collected. Their discovery of ‘left-handed’ plants is one of the first results – published with her colleague Will Edwards from James Cook University.

“We tested three hypotheses,” says Angela, an evolutionary biologist at The University of New South Wales.

“1) that plant twining direction is random; 2) that twining direction is determined by plant tips following the apparent movement of the sun across the sky; and 3) that twining direction is determined by the Coriolis effect.”

This is the effect that Bart Simpson thought made water go down the drain in different directions north and south of the equator.

“We found no difference in the proportion of stems twining clockwise vs anticlockwise between the northern and southern hemispheres. In fact, 92% of the stems we recorded twined in an anticlockwise direction.”

“We rejected all three of our theories. We are now investigating the possibility that the widespread phenomenon of anticlockwise twining arises as a function of the left-handed bias of all biological molecules on earth.”

Interestingly, about 94% of spiral sea shells spiral in the same direction, and 90-93% of people are right-handed.

Angela says the study illustrates just how little we actually know about the world in which we live. In an earlier study she compiled information on 12,669 plant species. She discovered that plant seeds in the tropics are, on average, 300 times bigger than seeds in colder places like the northern coniferous forests.

That led her to set up the World Herbivory Project to answer big questions about plant variation worldwide. She visited 75 study sites in two years. The results include a plant height database with entries for some 35,000 different species.

In the long term, Angela hopes that her ideas will lead to the development of sophisticated software that can predict larger ecological questions. It could for example predict the impact of climate change on Sydney. It could also warn which plants are likely to become weeds in a particular ecosystem.

The study The global trend in plant twining direction was published in Global Ecology and Biogeography(2007)16, 795–800.

Angela is one of four recipients of the $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships for 2008.

· Amanda Barnard, a theoretical physicist from The University of Melbourne, who is investigating the safety of nanoparticles

· Erika Cretney, an immunologist from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, who is unravelling the complexity of the immune system

· Natalie Borg, a protein chemist from Monash University in Melbourne, who is analysing protein crystals with synchrotron light to understand how we fight virus attacks

· Angela Moles, an evolutionary biologist from The University of New South Wales, who is studying big ecology – how and why plants vary around the world.

They will receive their Fellowships from David de Kretser, Governor of Victoria, and Mark Tucker, CEO of L’Oréal Australia, at a ceremony at Eureka89 in Melbourne at 6pm on Tuesday 26 August 2008.

Images
Click on image to view higher resolution version