Elizabeth Sattely: Plants are the ultimate chemists

They make a remarkable array of chemicals to survive the world around them. One engineer is using that knowledge to help people live better. When things aren’t going well for humans and other ambulatory creatures, they simply move on to a new location, a new life. For plants, it’s different, says chemical engineer Elizabeth Sattely, who studies the evolutionary adaptations plants make to survive. Unable to migrate, plants must make do with the hand that’s dealt them. And sometimes that hand is not very good. The soils where they are rooted can lack nutrients or play host to pathogens. The air can be polluted or too arid. This fact of life, however, has given rise to a remarkable breadth of evolutionary adaptations plants use to make the best of their surroundings. They produce powerful small molecules that help them get more nutrients from the soil or air. And, they partner with microbes that help them live. Sattely hopes to better understand and, possibly, employ these adaptations for human benefit by making crops more robust to environmental challenges and by learning how the small molecules plants create impact human health. She says we might even turn plants into biofactories that produce medicines and other valuable chemicals. Join host Russ Altman and Sattely for a deeper look at the remarkable world of plant biochemistry. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.