2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Research-led inquiry is an effective method to reinforce concepts being taught in the classroom. This work highlights an upper level capstone crop physiology course with a term long research experience in phenotyping and modeling different lines of peas presented to students as unknowns at the beginning of the course. The overall objective was to reinforce concepts presented in the lecture portion of the course while experiencing an authentic research experience. Students grew and characterized different lines of pea throughout a course in crop physiology taken by both Crop and Soil Science majors and Horticulture majors in the Department of Plant and Earth Science at UW-River Falls. A packet of unlabeled seeds was given to groups of 2-3 students at the beginning of the course for characterization throughout the term. Each week plant height and age (number of expanded leaves) were recorded from greenhouse grown plants in the Fall of 2018. When plants were age 6-7, plants in one pot were treated with the plant hormone gibberellin A₄ (GA₄) to determine whether a group’s line of pea was a gibberellin responding dwarf. Leaf, flower and pod phenotypes were also determined. To address a biotechnology objective of the course, students learned how to design primers to study expression of the Gigas gene in a One-Step RT-PCR reaction and then designed an experiment to investigate flowering in their specific line of pea. Overall, this project fostered a sense of exploration and discovery and characterizations of the different lines used in this study will be presented.