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-: Imagine for a moment that you're a homicide detective
who's just received an anonymous tip.
Now, as you arrive at the scene, it's visceral.
Clearly, your victim has suffered a gunshot wound as
a cause of death, but the trail is cold.
It's been weeks since the crime was committed.
Now, fortunately, in their haste, the assailant accidentally
left behind their calling card at the scene.
But, the calling card itself just contains lists of
different names or aliases.
So how do we determine who our murderer was?
And for that matter, how do we even know
that it was a murder?
Could it not have just been an accident and the assailant
fled the scene in fear afterwards?
Well, unfortunately, and albeit to a much lesser magnitude,
in agriculture we're asked similar questions all the time.
When our, herbicide detectives you can think of them,
are asked to investigate the cause of crop injury
like we see with the soybeans here.
Now, like being able to easily detect a gunshot wound
as a cause of death, generally based on the specific
symptoms presented by the crop, we can determine the cause.
But in this case, the cause implicated is actually an entire
class of herbicides called the synthetic auxin herbicides.
Now, the problem with these herbicides is that, like having
multiple aliases, there are multiple different formulations
of herbicide products available on the market that each
contain the exact same synthetic auxin molecule.
Fortunately though, there are also additive molecules added
to these different products, which themselves differ,
only a little bit though,
in subtle molecular structure differences.
So you might ask yourself, why does that matter?
Why do we even care?
And the answer is, because of all those products available,
only a couple of them are labeled for legal use in crops.
Which means that if the injury to these soybeans was caused
by one of the non-labeled formulations, it's illegal and
tentamount to egregious soybean murder.
Where as, if one of the labeled herbicides causes the
injury, it's just a simple accident.
But, you're not gonna be able to distinguish that with
the naked eye weeks after the fact.
And so, what my research is doing, is developing a method
utilizing an analytic chemistry technique called
infrared spectroscopy that takes plant tissue samples from
these damaged plants and runs them through a spectrometer
machine, like we see here in the inset image, which itself
shoots a beam of infrared light through the sample and
then characterizes and determines the frequency and pattern
of the light that is transmitted through the sample and
presents it in an image,
like we see here in the outset image.
And that image is called a spectrum.
You can kind of think it as the shadow
of an individual molecule.
And so, by analyzing a specific region on this spectrum,
we can characterize subtle differences in molecular
vibrations of the functional groups on the additive molecule
which allows us to determine the exact herbicide
that caused the injury, and thus determine if it was
an accident or soybean murder.
Thus ultimately allowing us to protect crop producers
from those who choose to illegally apply herbicides
by catching them (infra)red-handed.
Thank you.
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