S3E03 - Cellulose (Plant Cell Biology)

#Cellulose #GeniusGames #InDefenseOfPlants #Plants #Botany #CellBiology #MolecularBiology #BoardGames #Science #SciComm

Summary

This mont we talk Cellulose and all things plants with special guest Matt Candeias, of the In Defense of Plants podcast. In this sequel to Cytosis, we dive inside of a plant cell in a worker-placement game that while similar to its predecessor also adds a lot of new mechanics and strategy. As usual, Genius Games's science is top-notch, and we get to talk about photosynthesis, Rubisco, how plants nearly wrecked the environment (twice!), why C4 photosynthesis is the best photosynthesis, and the weirdest ways plant use their energy. So grab a houseplant and settle back for all things Cellulose.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introductions
• 02:40 Pollen and pointy sticks
• 07:59 Intro to Cellulose
• 13:47 Rubisco & chloroplasts
• 20:47 The cell wall
• 25:15 Plant movement
• 29:12 Elements of photosynthesis
• 32:09 CAM & C4 photosynthesis
• 38:03 Water and light shaping plant distributions
• 42:14 Weirdest use for cellulose
• 44:52 Nitpick corner
• 51:12 Grades
• 56:27 Wrap-up

Links

• Official Game Website (Genius Games)
• In Defense of Plants (Podcast & Book)
• 430,000 year old wooden tool (Science.org)
• The evolution of C4 photosynthesis (New Phytologist)
• Skunk cabbage and philodendron making heat (In Defense of Plants) 

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 

This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Jason  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Brian  0:10  
Today, we're going to talk about cellulose by genius games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason, and we have a very special guest with us today, Dr Matt Candeias, who is holding up the wall against plant blindness. He is the host of In Defense of Plant, and I'm already breaking my thing. I should be letting him introduce himself, Matt, tell us about yourself.

Matt  0:36  
Well, first off, thank you guys so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. My name is Matt Candeias, yeah, I'm an ecologist by training. I have always had an interest in sort of the way the natural world interacts with itself, us including and for about the last probably 20 years of my life, that has largely been focused on how plants set the foundation for everything in this world. So yeah, my PhD is in plant ecology. I spent a lot of time looking at how plants kind of form communities and structure themselves over different gradients in the environment. It's been a lot of fun. And as you mentioned, I run in defense of plants, so for many, many years of my life, surprisingly, that number goes up every year and just hits me with a whole new sense of, Oh, I'm getting older. Yeah. It's been a, basically my Ode to My love to plants, and trying to share that passion with the world and try to get people to see plants the way I do. You know, it was one of those things where I just kind of always thought that plants got the short shrift when it came to science communication and the way we looked at the natural world. You know, cheetahs are exciting, elephants are brilliant. Why aren't we talking about plants like that, other than as food or medicine, which is cool, but plants are their own organisms, so I created in defense of plants to celebrate that. And it's been a love affair of communicating that in many different forums, but mostly through podcasting, ever since,

Brian  1:51  
you are the host, but you have talked to everyone. You have had so many episodes, and you have on special guests pretty much almost every episode. I can't imagine what it's like to schedule all of that.

Matt  2:03  
Calendars give me anxiety. So it's always anxious. I have tons of anxiety around it, but it's kind of streamlined at this point, and it's just fun. And it turns out that people really want to share their passion too. And when you come in and say, Hey, I'd like to promote the science you're doing, I think it's really cool. People are really receptive to that. So, you know, they my guests make it very easy on me as best as they can. You know, it's the herding cats. The phrase always comes to mind though. You know, we just do our best.

Brian  2:29  
All right, so I'm glad that you were able to join us for a very plant centric game. I know it's much more cellular biology than ecology, but again, couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to get you to come on and talk to us. But before we get into talking about cellulose, let's do a little bit of science banter. So what's something cool you learned recently or heard about a story or anything like that? We usually let the guest host go first. Did you? Did you have anything that you want to share with the class?

Matt  2:57  
Yeah? Yeah. So luckily, shout out to my friend Allison, who puts me on on point every week goes give me a plant fact. I was thinking about this the other day, and it's one thing that I've heard, you know, throughout my education, throughout my career, and just for some reason, tucked away and never gave it much thought. But lately it's really been hitting me is that pollen is a male gametophyte. It's technically a separate organism. And I think, you know, people make a lot of jokes about what pollen is, and they're getting allergic to, you know, certain types of essentially, plant sperm. And, yeah, that's not wrong. There's sperm involved. But pollen itself is a fascinating structure that is really it's its own haploid organism. And I think that, to me, is really cool, because if you're in the plant world, you know, mosses and ferns get a lot of credit for having this alternation of generations flowering plants have carried that on. It's just a highly reduced form, and we don't think of it in the classic model that you do when you're teaching about the non vasculars or the ferns, that kind of thing.

Brian  3:50  
I still remember in college learning about the alternation of generations just being so confused.

Matt  3:57  
It's so cool, though. It's one of those things that when you think about the way we approach teaching about plants or getting people excited about plants, we're still so stuck in decades old ways of kind of getting that their head wrapped around, like, what is the parts of a flower, which eventually you can learn. I think if we started with these, like, how alien plants can be in terms of what we take for granted as everyday life as a vertebrate, mammal, animal, whatever you want to call it. It's just these things that like they can be very confusing, but plants are very weird, and that's a good jumping off point to get people excited about it.

Jason  4:29  
 Yeah, my primary experience with pollen is walking through a cornfield where corn is taller than I am. It's dropping tons of pollen because it's wind pollinated. It falls on my sweaty arms, germinates and tries to burrow into my skin. Corn pollen allergies are actually a serious occupational hazard in my field,

Matt  4:29  
 I believe it. Yeah, I feel bad for all of my botanist colleagues that like have pine pollen allergies and work on the coastal plain like it's a nightmare, but they endure. But that's a good sci fi book, right there. I mean, you've got the foundation for a good pitch. You just kind of got to flesh it out a little bit more 

Jason  5:04  
The Last of Us, but it's corn. Okay.

Brian  5:07  
What about you? Jason, what'd you bring? Did you bring anything to share?

Jason  5:10  
So a few weeks ago, I read this article summarizing a paper in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences about finding the oldest confirmed wooden tools used by humans. It's from 430,000 years ago in Greece, around an elephant carcass that was apparently killed and butchered by some of our human ancestors. And the thing is, apparently, at least, if you're an archeologist, being able to tell a rock from a stone tool is apparently fairly easy. At least the article made it implies such, but telling a stick that has been sharpened to be used as a tool from just a kind of pointy stick is hard, apparently they but around this elephant, there were apparently several dozen wooden bits, and so they cataloged them all. They looked at them, and two of them under the microscope showed clear signs of having been shaped by humans in terms of like scraping and being used as a tool for various things. Exactly what? Don't know, because, as one of the authors said, there's a lot you can do with a pointy stick. But given that there were a lot of predators around, there was a lot of prey around, they were probably doing something. And they even pointed out that it's a relatively primitive pointy stick, because they basically just grabbed, they used a piece of wood from something local, and they basically just sharpened it, and that was it. Whereas you go forward a few 10s of 1000s years, apparently we found Spears where they're sourced from hardwoods, they're further away and that they have been not only sharpened, but then they've been hardened in fire to make them better points and so this is like a very early example of woodworking for human tool use.

Brian  6:49  
Okay, so we learned how to slowly refine the pointy stick technology, yes, to

Jason  6:55  
make them pointier and harder and better at doing whatever you want to do with a pointy stick, which is largely stabbing it in something else.

Brian  7:04  
This reminds me of a story that you told at a panel that we were on at Dragon Con about when early humans moved into places where bamboo was common and you stop having a history of stone tools.

Jason  7:18  
Yes, that was a I learned that way back in undergrad, I think. But the idea was that bamboo is much easier to shape than stone, but also can be just about as sharp. And so humans did what humans did. They took the easy way out. And so we lost the stone tool record there because they were using a much more biodegradable substance. And that is part of why it's so hard to find wooden tools in the in the in the archeological record is because wood decays. Rocks don't,

Brian  7:45  
yes, rocks have to erode. Yeah.

Jason  7:47  
But I figured, given that wood is made of cellulose, it was appropriate for this episode, and it'd be a great way of showing that some of that cellulose, even though a lot of it gets eaten or burned or whatever, some of it sticks around for a very long time.

Brian  7:59  
Yeah, I was just about to thank you for giving me a perfect transition, for talking about the talking about the game. Because, you know, bamboo wood, we're talking about cellulose, basically as this very durable material that sort of defines plants for what they are. It's one of the defining things that makes something a plant is the presence of cellulose. Cellulose is a game that is published by genius games. Again, we've already we've had many of their games in the past. They are specialists in this area of creating hard science games, games that are representing the science accurately, although always simplified to a certain degree, because it still has to be a fun game to play. So it is typically marketed as the sequel to the game Cytosis, which is an engine building game that's played inside of an animal cell. I think it's more specifically supposed to be a human cell. Cellulose is played mostly inside of a plant cell, kind of it's actually a little bit more organismal than just that. Going back to elementary school, every one of us probably had a STEM or a science class where we had to make a little model of a cell, and you could either do an animal cell or a plant cell. This is the game that is played inside of a plant cell. So we have some things that are conserved, that are found in both both an animal cell and a plant cell has a nucleus, they both have an endoplasmic reticulum, they both use ribosomes. They both have a cell membrane. But as you can imagine, in cellulose, we're focusing on more of the mechanic around those things that make a plant cell unique. In particular, the presence of a rigid cell wall made of cellulose, hence the name of the game, the presence of chloroplasts, where photosynthesis will occur. And one thing that often kind of gets skipped or looked over a little bit is the presence of a large central vacuole. Yes, animal cells have vacuoles, but in plant cells, it can be like 90% of the volume of the cell is just this large central receptacle of the vacuole.

Jason  9:53  
Yeah, and if you don't remember your cell biology, the vacuole is basically just a it's a storage bag. It's just a bag of. Stuff that the cell sticks things in to store them, and in

Brian  10:04  
particular for plants, a lot of that is water, and that's really what's giving cells all their shape and their rigidity and kind of letting plant cells be plant cells.  Next to your cell you also have sort of a picture of a very generic plant with a very generic shoot and very generic root that you'll be sort of moving a little marker up to sort of determine how many resources you get at the beginning of your of different phases of the game. The central mechanic of the game is you are trying to sort of grow your shoot and your root to get more resources. You are bringing in carbon dioxide. You're bringing in water to make sugar that you can either burn for energy or you can deposit into the cell wall, which as that as each of those glucose molecules is created and added to the cell wall. Eventually, that leads to the end of the game, right? Once the cell wall has been completely manufactured, that's kind of, you know, where you tally up all your points and you're done.

Jason Wallace  10:58  
It's the turn tracker. And what's nice is that the game automatically adds to it every turn, so that there is a finite state. But it's also because you have some control, the players can sort of manipulate that to be to their advantage, to either end the game sooner or just by not doing it end the game later.

Brian  11:15  
So it's still sort of, again, if we think about the original Cytosis game, what we're doing is going through the process of from the nucleus, making mRNA, making protein, secreting things out of the cell. What did we decide that? Oh, this must be an endocrine cell, because you're making so many hormones or something. But in cytosis, you're playing a generic plant cell, trying to finish your cell wall, right? And the engine is really the engine of photosynthesis, yep.

Jason Wallace  11:40  
And you also have remember the various cards you can get that can be things like starch storage or various proteins and enzymes. And there's a bit more of an engine building component to cellulose than to psychosis, where as you get these enzymes, they can trigger each other again, if you've got the protein to spend. And so one way of getting a victory is actually building up a protein engine to just generate a lot of resources or points, or what have you, which is not something you can do in Cytosis.

Brian  12:07  
And also some of those cards have huge changes and very enormous swing on the game, like the starch card, very expensive, but worth a massive amount of victory points. I think, Well, you got like, two starch cards, and you got so far ahead of me when we played that I just never even came close to catching up at that point. Which I mean, not that that's atypical for when Jason and I play games, but this was, this was pronounced,

Jason  12:32  
well, it's because the starch, so maybe we're jumping ahead to the science. But starch is made from a bunch of glucose strung together in real life, so it costs several pieces of your glucose, and that is an expensive piece. It takes a lot of game moves to synthesize every bit of glucose, and so you're spending a lot of them on starch. They want to reward you for that.

Brian  12:51  
Like Matt, did you get a chance to play cellulose before we sat down to talk? Yeah?

Matt  12:55  
Yeah. It was actually kind of a rough, quick sort of play through sort of thing. So in terms of strategy and stuff. I it's gonna be a few more plays before I get down that road. But, yeah, it was, it was interesting, because I do, like these engine building games. I really do, unless I'm playing with someone I'm guessing, like Jason in your life, that's really good at kind of seeing where the strengths and weaknesses are, and just build these unbeatable engines. So it's a blessing and a curse. Yeah.

Brian  13:22  
Jason's really good at, sort of like, you know, seeing the matrix and just kind of like, you know, zeroing in on what the optimal strategy is with what appears to me as at a glance. Let's talk about some of the science here.

Jason  13:35  
Well, we should probably start very basic as, like, chloroplasts and the synthesis, synthesis of cellulose. Let's do the molecular stuff, get it out of the way, and then we can step back and do the broader stuff, where Matt's expertise will shine.

Brian  13:47  
The best way, I think, to connect the mechanics of the game. And it's very clear from the design of the game is it's focused on the things that make plant cells sort of unique and different from animal cells. And those are, we've already talked about them, sort of the vacuole, the cell wall, and in particular, the chloroplast, right? The chloroplast is the, I don't know, what do we always say for the mitochondria, it's the powerhouse of the cell. The chloroplast is the powerhouse for everything, solar panels of life, for sure. So the chloroplast is where all the magic happens, right? It's where a plant is going to combine carbon dioxide and water, using the energy of light to create to create sugar, to create glucose, right? That everything else uses producing water and oxygen as a byproduct.

Jason  14:40  
This is what makes almost all life on planet Earth go round. There are a few exceptions that live way deep in the ocean or way deep underground, but anything that most of us would recognize is eventually powered by the sun through these chloroplasts,

Brian  14:54  
the chemical reaction, more or less is represented in the game. It takes six carbon dioxide. Add six water to make all of the carbons in one sugar.

Jason  15:04  
Yeah, and this is done by a an enzyme called Rubisco. Full Name is ribulose one five bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase, 

Brian  15:12  
which is why we call it Rubisco instead. 

Jason Wallace  15:15  
Yes, exactly. But by some accounts, this is the most abundant protein on Earth, as plants make gobs and gobs and gobs of it in order to actually perform photosynthesis. And so it is everywhere on this planet. And it is old. I think the estimate I saw was somewhere around, like 4 billion years. It's estimated to have been around like way before there was much oxygen. Well, any measurable amount of oxygen in our atmosphere,

Brian  15:39  
which surprisingly, actually, you can kind of still see the effects of in how that enzyme functions, right?

Jason  15:45  
Jason, yeah, we're not going to get into suffice it to say that Rubisco actually doesn't deal well with the presence of oxygen, and we may talk a bit about this later, but it's it shows its hallmarks of having evolved when it didn't have to worry about this highly caustic oxygen molecule floating around and potentially causing problems with it.

Speaker 2  16:05  
That is my favorite part about Rubisco, though, I have to say it's the part I always glom on to with my limited molecular experience. I just love that fact about it 

Brian  16:14  
is that it basically gets poisoned by oxygen. 

Matt  16:16  
Yeah, the fact that you know, evolution is often kind of perceived in the larger public is this being this highly optimized, we're getting the best solution. And Rubisco is like, Nah, we figured this out, like 400 some odd million years ago, and it works. It works good enough, but it's still the byproduct of what it did to the planet that is poison to it. So it's this funny sort of balancing act of like, let's just get past enough so that these things can reproduce, and we're good,

Jason  16:41  
yeah, and I guess this may be a bit of an aside into evolutionary theory, but it's basically trapped in what's called an evolutionary optimum, where it there's probably a better version of Rubisco out there, like there could be a better version out there that doesn't have that problem, but anything but getting from our current version to that would have to go through something that doesn't work very well, and so is strongly selected again, so we can't get there. We're stuck with where it's at. Except that there are some groups out there trying to engineer better versions of Rubisco. And I don't know what state there are in. I haven't heard of any Nobel prizes being given out for that, so I don't think they've managed it yet, but I know there are people working on it.

Brian  17:20  
So chloroplasts are thought to have evolved very, very solid evidence that they evolved through a process called endosymbiosis, which basically the chloroplast as we see it in eukaryotes. Actually, its ancestor was a free living blue green algae, basically a bacteria that became engulfed and adapted into eukaryotic eukaryotic cells. And some of the evidence for this is the fact that chloroplasts have their own little, circular genome that still even makes its own little ribosomes for protein synthesis that are the same size and shape as bacterial ribosomes. So it's highly reduced, but they still basically, you can tell what they used to be based on these remnant features.

Jason  18:05  
Yes, and mitochondria are the same way, actually. So mitochondria are also thought to be a result of one of these ancient endosymbiosis events. They're called. And you can also see this because I believe it's this way for both chloroplasts and mitochondria a cell. I don't think cells can assemble them from scratch. I think they have to divide from existing ones. So you have your cell which divides, but inside your cell you have your chloroplast and your mitochondria, which are also dividing in order to make new ones for the daughter cell.

Brian  18:34  
But I know that there are several diseases in animals and humans that are associated with the mitochondria being defective. I'm aware of some things like that in the chloroplast as well you can end up with so like variegation that you get in plants, for instance, where you'll have sections of the leaf where you have a change in color, a loss of that green, or segments that would be white or or a lighter yellow, or something like that are caused by mutations, not in the genes in the nucleus, but in the genes in the chloroplast itself.

Matt  19:05  
Have you heard of the albino redwoods? No. So there are sports of redwoods in the wild, and they're super highly guarded secrets, because I think people try to poach them, but they they're sports that develop with no chlorophyll, or at least such reduced chlorophyll levels that they're just a ghostly white version of it, and it's one of the few instances where I don't think they function at all Photosynthetically, and they don't die right away, or in many cases, they don't die right away, because redwoods are really good at grafting, so they're almost living as like this parasitic offshoot, albino offshoot of the parent tree, because it's still able to channel nutrients to sort of that Little rhizomatous sprout it has, it's a weird thing. You should look into it.

Jason  19:43  
I was wondering, because we get albino corn plants every now and then, just because we work with genetics corn, which is really crappy, and so it has mutations in it every now and that show up, and they they only last, like a week, and then they've exhausted their their food supply, and they're dead.

Brian  19:59  
So. The the sort of creepy, okay, like plants have modular bodies, right? But the idea of having a parasitic limb is very troubling,

Matt  20:08  
right, right? It does nothing for me, but it's attached and I feed it.

Brian  20:16  
Okay? So chloroplasts, super important, super essential. Basically, you all of the carbon in your body came from chloroplast and came from carbon dioxide. Right now, it definitely is true, some of the nitrogen probably came from an artificial fertilizer, but the carbon came from photosynthesis.

Jason  20:34  
I mean, unless someone's eating, like, tube worms and such,

Matt  20:40  
Oh, you haven't like,

Jason Wallace  20:41  
like, bulk, like, deep sea vent crab, like, delicious.

Brian  20:47  
Now let's talk about the other big thing that makes plants super different from animal cells, actually. Okay. Again, we want to talk about how the weird vertebrate perspective skews our perspective of things. How about just the weird animal perspective? Animal cells don't have cell walls, and we like to talk about that as normal. That's not normal. Every other living thing has a rigid cell wall, okay? And plants would be like the the that's fungi, that's bacteria, that's almost everything has a rigid cell wall, except, for some reason, animal cells. But plant cell walls are made up of the structural polysaccharide. I'm sorry, I'm going to use too much jargon. Jason's going to catch me on these and backfill with what this stuff actually means. Cellulose is a rigid polymer basically made of glucose, which is like, that's just pure sugar. It's this simple as six carbon sugar. What's the best way to explain glucose?

Jason Wallace  21:39  
Jason, it's the most common sugar. So if you have your table sugar, that's that's actually a little two sugars put together. It's one thing of glucose and one thing of fructose joined together. So it's like half of table sugar. 

Brian  21:51  
So it's like glucose is the very easiest sugar for any cell to use and break down. It makes up table sugar. It's the sort of carbon and sugar currency of biology and cellulose is made of glucose that, weirdly, is almost completely resistant to being broken down and used as anything. 

Jason Wallace  22:13  
So cellulose and starch are both just chains of glucose put together, but they differ in where the connection is in for starch, it's on one carbon, and for cellulose, it's on another. And starch is like, everything's food. Everything eats starch. It's how you store it. You break it down. It's fine. It's very easy. Cellulose is like a rock, like hardly anything digests cellulose. This is why cows have their massive, like, four chambered stomachs, and they're basically just like fermenting bathtubs on legs is because they can't break down cellulose, and so they have this big bioreactor they walk around with to feed all the bacteria that are digesting cellulose for them, because they can't and because hardly Anything can.

Brian  22:59  
Plants have made one of the most durable polymers, except for, like, modern plastics and stuff like that, out of food, right out of the easiest sugar to digest. They've turned it into something that basically could barely be broken down. And, like, technically, why we have coal is because cellulose is so hard to break down.

Jason  23:20  
Yeah, it's all that's left. Like, that's coal is stored sunlight from hundreds of millions of years ago, with most of the other stuff just like, kind of broken down. It's what's left, right?

Matt  23:30  
And those ecosystems were massive forests, I mean, covered the earth in many carry cases, not everywhere on Earth, but they were expansive. And it all happened during a time before there were fungi and certain types of bacteria that got good at it, it hadn't evolved yet. And so that's these deposits were put down long before anything could come by and even remotely hope of utilizing it, which is why it's such a vast store on this planet.

Jason Wallace  23:53  
Yeah, I've heard some debates on that, but regardless, I think a lot of them were also in very wet areas, so they were anoxic. There was no oxygen around. So even if there were bacteria and fungi break it down, they didn't have any oxygen to do so. And so just like modern peat bogs and such, they just stuck around.

Brian  24:10  
I do like thinking about how much plants have changed the fundamental chemistry of the planet again and again and again. I mean, they were some of the biggest polluters in evolutionary history, right? Literally poisoning all of the life on Earth by accumulating huge amounts of oxygen, which is actually still quite toxic, even to themselves, then creating huge amounts of cellulose and lignin, which is the other major structural component of trees that also couldn't break down. It's like before humans came along and invented plastic, plants were pretty much doing the same thing. Before we move ahead, I want to talk about how weird plant cells are compared to animal cells, because that rigid cell, well, it's not just that. It's rigid. They're all glued together, right? They're they're afixed to one another, they cannot move. So like, unlike you in your body, you have blood cells. You have cells that move in your body, that flex and will move throughout. Plants don't do that. A plant cell is fixed in place to all of its neighbors, and that really changes how they function, right?

Matt  25:15  
Big time. I mean, when you think about what makes studying plants so wonderful is they don't get up and move away, and when you think about the challenges they face, and put it into the context of all their adaptations, it comes down to that rigid structure of them, kind of having to display a surface as best as possible to the sun and do everything else around the physical constraints of that. Now there are plants with really fast movements, and it's fascinating to dive into, like how a Venus Fly Trap, closes its trap and then reopens it. Or, like the bladderworts. It's one of the fastest movements in the biological world, the way the little bladder can inflate itself and then engulf its prey that way. But, you know, I think of like Darwin's experiments, this is stuff that's fascinated scientists forever is like, how do tendrils wrap around and they've all had to kind of evolve these creative ways of stretching that structural component of elongating or shortening that cell wall. And it's a really fun kind of journey to take when you realize just they're anchored in a place. Because, again, I think we take elasticity, you know, as someone who's completely not flexible in this world, we take it for granted, though, you know. And then you think about all the other things about plants that revolve around just the fact that they're, like you said, These multi iterations of these repeated structures. But at the core of it are those plant cells with the cell wall kind of keeping everything in place. It also gives them a lot of strength, too, and rigidity and staying power, as we kind of just talked about for the last few minutes.

Brian  26:39  
The The interesting thing is that, like we do get really kind of obsessed with things like Venus fly traps or rapid plant movements, because it seems so unusual, but plants do, they have behavior. They do move. They seek nutrients, they they will climb and do all of these interesting things. It's happening at a slightly different timescale, and it's all mediated by growth. It's so different from what we think like for a plant to go find a new nutritional source underground. It has to grow and elongate its roots to do so it's like whereas an animal just walks over there and gets it right. So it's they're still doing the same thing. They're just doing it in a fundamentally different way.

Jason Wallace  27:19  
Yeah, and a lot of the above ground movement is with that vacuole you mentioned, where pumping it full of water or letting it empty out so things get stiff or so they get a little relaxed. Is how, like sunflowers track the sun. I believe that could, because they're expanding on one side and then contracting on another. Or leaves that go up and down, which you only ever really notice if you're watching, like a high speed video of what a plant does throughout the day or with different temperatures and such.

Brian  27:44  
It's really fun. If you've ever watched, like, a sped up video of like, let's say, sea stars or something, or sea urchins. They look like they're sessile they're not. They're moving quite a bit. It's kind of the same scale for plants. There's a lot of movement. Like plant leaves flutter up and down constantly. You just don't notice it.

Matt  28:01  
Yeah, I think of like, people that grow, you know, the house plant movement being as big as it is, calathea, for instance. I mean, during the day, the leaves are out catching the rays. They're vertical, or at least horizontal, or they're, like, perpendicular to the sun's rays to the best extent possible. And then at night they they go up, and it's something you can track. Throughout the day, you go away to work in the morning, they're in one way. You come back at night, or, you know, you're out with friends, you come back and you notice they they've moved. It's just you would need to set up a slow mo camera to capture it in real time. But it's just a different pace of life, which I do kind of appreciate, because it all feeds back into trying to have this sort of sci fi esque adventure on planet Earth. It's out there. You just, you know, got to pay attention a little bit more to see it.

Brian  28:41  
So let's see. So we talked about how the Okay, I would love to talk about the vacuole more, but I'm really not sure what to talk about. Again, it's like the cell wall creates a rigid shape, and the cell gets inflated by the vacuole, sort of expanding like a water balloon, to kind of keep that rigid. And that's kind of the secret sauce for plants. That's where that strength comes from. Is basically by sequestering water in this central it's like they have a they have a skeleton of water balloons,

Matt  29:09  
classic turgor.

Brian  29:12  
And that might let us transition to into another thing. So remember, we talked about how photosynthesis you need. What do you need? You need light, right? So what is a leaf but a big biological solar panel, right? Just to collect all that sunlight, and they can move, and they can even shift the chloroplasts. To make that process more efficient, you need to get water, and that's going to come from, you know, our roots, and move up through who wants to explain transpiration.

Matt  29:39  
So on the leaf, you've heard about stomata. They're these pores. It's two cells that kind of surround an open area that can swell and contract, all based on turgor pressure, like we said, in and of itself. But they are essentially the ends of one end of the straw, the other end of the straw. If you can imagine these bundles of straws that are plants goes down into the roots and so. As through variety of processes, heat whatever water availability they can, open and close those and what that does is essentially open and close the tip of that straw. And so any water that's in the soil, around the roots or in the tissues of the plant, if it's starting to evaporate out, it moves in, others below it, molecule wise, move in to replace it. And I think it's mostly through that, like, weak, attractive force of of water, right? It's dead tissue, so capillary action, right? And so through capillary action, as water evaporates out of the stomata, which is usually in the leaf, but it can be in the stems, it can be in the flowers, it's pulling water up behind it. And so that's why, you know, when you stop watering your house plants, you cut off that supply at the base, they start running out of that water, and you'll start to see that wilting, because the vacuole is no longer staying supplied, and it's losing water through those pores. But that's the way water defies gravity through plants without any muscular contractions.

Brian  30:54  
Just the miraculous thing, the tallest plants in the world are still basically getting the water all the way up from the roots through just capillary action,

Jason  31:02  
tiny, tiny, microscopic straws that are going up redwoods.

Brian  31:06  
Yeah, and those stomata, you need the evaporation to pull the water up, but that's also how the carbon dioxide is getting in right at the same time. So it's controlling turgor to open and close the little stomata. And a leaf is several things. It's a solar panel, but it's also a lung, right? It's where all the gas exchange occurs, right? And that could mean water vapor going out, but it can also mean oxygen and carbon dioxide coming in. And that

Jason  31:32  
was one of the little bits I liked from the game cellulose. Is that when you collect carbon dioxide, you actually drop the amount of water you're able to collect, which is a real thing, because you only get plants, only get carbon dioxide when they're stomata open, but that lets water go out. And for people who work on, say, drought tolerant crops, this is a big issue is you've got to try to balance those two things, because you can't get both of them at the same time.

Brian  31:54  
So one of the things we didn't had a chance to play with this, but I did look at it. You've got two scenario cards where they sort of change the rules ever so slightly. One is a mangrove, so a plant growing in a completely water saturated thing, and they sort of change the root architecture. The more interesting one is the cacti. I don't we can get into talking about this later, but for the cacti, you start with less water. You also don't drop the water level when you get carbon dioxide. And they call those CAM stomata, which is kind of right, but kind of also not right. I think who wants to talk about cam photosynthesis? 

Matt  32:32  
It's one of my favorites. It's one of the few places, Yeah,

Jason Wallace  32:36  
you're good. They hear from us all the time. They don't

Brian  32:39  
need to hear from us anymore.

Matt  32:40  
No, I love CAM, because I think so many people again, you learn c3 maybe you get into c4 in high school, and that's where a lot of people stop with plants. But CAM is all around us, especially if you collect succulents. There's so many plants that are doing this, and it's so fascinating, because it does kind of help in these dry environments, which is why it's the cactus card in this game. I think they chose wisely, in that case, is essentially, and there's probably variations on this theme. You have this trade off in most plants, of like you said, having to be able to take in CO2, but also you want to reduce water loss. Well, in a really hot, dry environment, you can imagine that's a knife edge balance. And so some plants that have evolved crassulacean acid metabolism, Cam crassula, being the genus It's named after, which is kind of also cool, is you take in carbon dioxide at night, when it's much cooler, when the vapor pressure is a little bit easier on you, and you're not going to transpire as much, and then you store it in your vacuoles, going back to another aspect of the game, or the plants that are really neat as crassulacean acid, if you Were to chew on a cam plant, I don't recommend doing this, because some are very toxic. It would taste sort of acidic because it's stored as that and so during the day, when light is coming in and you're starting to do those light dependent reactions, they can take that Crassulacean acid out of solution and use that carbon instead of having to open their stomata and take in CO2, so they're able to keep their stomata closed, use stored carbon, and still photosynthesize without losing so much water in the process.

Brian  33:03  
So it's another way that plants have to solve this problem of you're going to lose water when you bring in CO2. So they separate it in time, right? They bring in the CO2, they stash it. I actually think I wouldn't be, you know, I'm surprised that we haven't seen the Could you help me with the pronunciation Crassulacean acid? Is that? Yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that there's not a whole wellness fad associated with just that showing up in energy drinks. But they stash that, then they close the stomata, and then they do the sort of light dependent parts at a different time, right? So you mentioned c3 c4 I'm gonna let Jason handle that one, because that's his specialty.

Jason Wallace  34:49  
But before we get on that, I do want to say you may not see the crasilic acid in health food, but let us remember that Agave is a cam plant, which means that every time that someone is taking a shot of Tequila, they are benefiting from Crassulacean acid metabolism.

Brian  35:04  
Okay, so the next time that I do a shot at tequila, I'll be sure to thank cam photosynthesis,

Jason  35:09  
yes, which I'm going to say is the second coolest form of photosynthesis on the planet. The coolest, of course,

Brian  35:15  
you are such You are such a corn fan I am.

Jason Wallace  35:21  
Look, if you actually crunch the numbers, like there is more corn on this planet than probably any other single species of plant. So it's like, I Yes, I am a fanboy. But so c3 c4 is a different way of photosynthesis. C3 is sort of the default named because the carbon it that it gets used as the central part of the process has three carbons in it, so it's a three carbon molecule. C4 uses a four carbon molecule instead. And whereas cam plants separate it in time, day versus night, c4 plants, which include corn, sorghum, a bunch of other tropical grasses, they separate it in space, they actually have a two layer photosynthesis system. There's the outer layer, which captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sticks it onto this c4 compound, and then shuttles it into an interior place where it then gets released. And the whole point of this is that that makes the local concentration of carbon dioxide around this Rubisco enzyme we talked about much, much higher than it would be if you were just relying on the atmosphere in general. And this seems to be a much more efficient version of photosynthesis, especially in places where it's like hot and dry, which is why you find a lot of these in tropical areas. And it's why c4 plants like sugar cane, sorghum, maize, corn, they are extremely prolific in terms of making biomass. They can fix a lot of carbon. And there are people working on trying to transfer that photosynthetic mechanism to others of our crops that are not like that. Like rice is a big one I hear about to try to capture that improved photosynthetic efficiency, because the idea is being if you could do this, then without adding any other fertilizer, any more water, anything like that, maybe even less water, you could dramatically increase the yields of these plants and make it easier to feed the planet. What? That's a hard thing to do. Evolution has done it, but evolution has had 10s of millions of years to do that, whether we'll manage it in the next 20 or 30, I don't know.

Brian  37:23  
It's only in some grasses, right? Are there other things besides grasses that do it?

Jason  37:27  
Well, it's mostly grasses monocots, but it has been evolved multiple times. Oh, right. So I just looked up a paper, and according to this paper, which we can cite, it says that c4 photosynthesis evolved 32 times in dicot, not even grasses, and then another 16 times in the monocots, which are grasses and some other relatives. So it hurt a lot

Brian  37:51  
of times. I had no idea so bad I've been so, wow. Okay, well, I mean, I'm a microbiologist, that's my excuse.

Jason Wallace  38:03  
Well, I have a question, and this, I think would go really well for Matt about ecology, because in the game, you've got two of the three things you need for photosynthesis, well represented. You've got water and you've got CO2, and then light is just kind of assumed to be there. But I don't know about CO2. I assume it's relatively evenly distributed over the world, but I know water and light are not how does that affect the kind of plants that we see out in the world?

Speaker 2  38:28  
Yeah, great question. I've always assumed it's more or less an even distribution. You know, you get into aquatic systems and things change, but you know, you think about the major limitations of that light and that water especially, and you start looking at the kinds of plants that occur in a desert versus a tropical rainforest, and there's exceptions to all of these rules, right? Biology is messy, and plants make it even messier, but having to be able to access those in a readily available way, or to be able to store them really changes that structural component of a plant, like you had said, when they go foraging for the the essential aspects of what makes plants possible, they have to grow. And so in a lot of cases, especially in dry environments, you'll see highly specialized root systems, either deep tap roots or some of my favorite are these specialized rooting structures like you see in the Proteas, for instance, in Australia and South Africa, are these roots that create habitat for specific types of fungi. And whereas a plant has kind of big cells, by comparison, bigger organs, fungi are these just super, super small hyphae that can cover so much more area of the soil. And so by partnering with these symbiotic fungi, they can gain access to so much more in trade for these carbohydrates. Now you see that other where other places in the globe, but then you think of like a very water rich environment where it's readily available, and you get trees that grow 100, 200 300 feet. And you know, the limitations of it are more about competition for light. And that's another thing I really like to talk about, too. Is light is such an important resource. If there wasn't competition among plants, it'd be a pretty uniform sized forest or grassland out there. And then, you know, you see in this sort of interim the rain shadows, where these grasslands, I love thinking about North America in this context, because right off of the rain shadow of the Rockies, you have the plains, the high like that short grass sort of element, where even the grasses kind of have to be a little bit more sensible about how much they're putting out, because above ground tissues need a lot of water, need a lot of nutrients. The closer you get to like the Mississippi the east, where that rain shadow kind of relaxes, you get the tall grass prairies where, you know, it's a sea of grass, you can get lost in these ecosystems. And then, you know, you get farther away on the East Coast, you get forests again. So it's really you think about that. It's that physical component of the plant can tell you a lot about the environment that it's growing in. And it all really comes back down to access to light, to water, to nutrients.

Brian  40:52  
That's Oh, the astute listener, those fungi. Those would be the mycorrhiza fungi, I assume, yes, yes. So those are from when we discuss undergrove so it all ties together, folks. And I've got a question

Jason Wallace  41:04  
for you, Matt, because this is something I remember hearing, and I think you may be able to confirm it. So I've heard that as far as like, light scarcity, so some plants that live in the understory of forests where they have to deal with a lot of taller things intersepting the light that they'll actually have layers of like pigments and colors on the bottom of their leaves to bounce the light back up so they get a second chance to absorb Is that true?

Matt  41:25  
I've heard a lot of debate, you know, especially like purple undersides, as to what role that's playing. There's a lot of debate around like bouncing the light back up, or protecting from those rare instances where, like, a sun fleck hits your leaf, right? If you're so used to shade, and then all of a sudden, this intense, direct sunlight hits you. One thing I will say is, if you pick up Dr David Lee's book about plant pigments, he does talk about different aspects of it, like variegation and different structures, different kinds of and intensities of chlorophyll and other pigments can really help with that. So I think there's a lot of elements of that that are very true, because you can really look at like the functional traits, these, these aspects, the pigmentation, the size, the shape of the leaf, and tell a lot about where a plant's growing. And you can kind of start picking out the shade lovers over the high sun plants in that context. So I think there's a lot of nuance to it, but you're definitely on the right track in many instances,

Jason  42:14  
with all this cellulose is being fixed. And I looked up the number, it's 157 billion tons of carbon get fixed every year by plants worldwide. Is the current best estimate, with all this carbon being fixed. What is the weirdest thing that you know of that plants do with that carbon they're making that they're fixing into cellulose or something else?

Matt  42:34  
Great One, and it's hard in the sense of like, oh yeah. Now I got to think about that a little bit more. And the one I came up with, and I think if you gave me another week, it would be a big competition in my brain for what comes out of my mouth first. But produce heat. I think that's one of the strangest things plants do, is produce heat, because you talk about weird world sort of stuff that we don't apply to plants, and heat production is generally not one of them. And there's many different pathways that plants do this. But by using some of those starches, some of those sugars, like things like certain aroids, skunk cabbage being a really common one, especially if you're in like Northeastern North America, it uses a lot of those stored starches to go through a metabolic pathway where the mitochondria kind of kicks in, into high gear for a certain period of time, and they produce heat in and around their flowers, which helps kind of melt through the snow. They're very early bloomer, like pretty much before most snow melts in a good snow year, and they produce these volatile organic compounds that kind of smell skunky and mushroomy. And they they there's a lot of you know, thought that they the heat helps kind of diffuse that out into the environment so that they can attract their pollinators, which are fungus gnats. In other cases, like there is a species of philodendron that was studied that it uses fats, which is kind of a weird thing. You don't think about fats in the plant kingdom very much, but this one uses some sort of alternative pathway through the mitochondria to burn these fat tissues, which, again, is coming from the carbon that these are producing through photosynthesis. And it hits such an intensity and produces so much heat that for the short window of time that it's doing this, its metabolic rate is comparable to that of a hummingbird, which what here's a plant doing something on par with one of the highest metabolic rates, I think maybe even the highest in the animal kingdom, which, that's insane. Yeah, it's wacky, mind blowing. It's a it's a shot in the pan, right? Like it is a short period of time when they're doing this. But this is a tropical plant growing in the canopy of a highly competitive environment, with a lot of other plants doing things to attract pollinators. There's a lot of competition. Let's be the weirdest we can right? Evolution has selected a plant that can kind of do what it needs to do for a short window of time. And you know that reproductive benefit outweighs the cost of producing, storing and burning fats at the rate of a hummingbird.

Brian  44:52  
That's fascinating. That's really cool. Love it. Let's do our nitpick corner. Nitpick corner, again, is a chance. Chance for us to just look at the game, look at the representation, and just be like, yes, but, or, well actually, to, you know, the game show on dropout or, and again, you don't have to nitpick if you don't want to. I think Jason and I played this recently, and I think we both may have picked out one thing in particular that sort of caught our attention. This is more of a gameplay nitpick. In the game, you have this side board that which is indicating your you know your plant. It's where you're growing your root and your shoot. When you're playing, you invest early in that growth, in growing your root, growing your shoot, to get your resources. You need plant hormones to do that, and you need to spend some resources after you've grown your root and your shoot. You never do that ever again.

Jason  45:40  
Yeah, there's like, two spaces on the board that just become useless as soon as you have gone all the way down those tracks, which is just kind of weird.

Brian  45:47  
It's like your plant evidently has one leaf and one root, which I know that there is that one plant that only makes the one giant leaf, but I don't think that's this plan.

Jason  45:55  
That's a metaphorical simplification. It's probably lots of different ones. It's like choosing different architectures or whatever. But it is odd that from a gameplay perspective, that there's an entire section of the board that once you hit it, you stop interacting with it. I had

Brian  46:10  
extra plant growth hormones that I just didn't need, didn't use, couldn't get rid of, and didn't get me any points.

Speaker 2  46:17  
Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. It is a weird, sort of anticlimactic element of the game, where you can kind of go in and then if, once you've played it, I'm sure you kind of get wise to that. But right out of the gate, like, I'm gonna grow and wait, that's it. I'm done. So in a way, it kind of peters it out. And I don't know there are determinant plants, there is a limit. But, you know, I go to games to have fun first, and education can be a happy second component of that, but that, I think it was a little weird.

Jason  46:45  
I think an easy partial fix would be for some of the cards that you can buy to have hormone costs, because then you have something to do. Now, that said genius games tries to stay honest to the science, like, if the only thing plant hormones do is grow a plant, well then you're kind of limited in what you can do. And I'm actually not a plant physiologist, so I don't know what else plant hormones are used for.

Brian  47:07  
Oh, well, they're there. They do everything but, but we don't need to get into that, but I can tell you another way they could have fixed it is, look, there are plenty of games where you could open up a new worker at a certain point. I want to open up a new shoots. I want to open up a new roots. That would add a lot of interesting complexity to the game if I because I went through, for instance, I went for shallow roots, so I got a great early reward, but it didn't pay off in the end. But once I go down that route, very realistically, plants don't grow backwards, but I could never grow a second root.

Matt  47:36  
I don't know why. Yeah, I think for all of the effort to make this game look good. It could have, you could have shrunk that board and then added like components that you could add to it, sort of like, you know, its own little separate board. But if you made more space for it, you could have done that. And I think it would have been more true to the strategy of being a plant, and had a lot more, like jumping off points, if education was more the goal there.

Brian  47:59  
Ooh, yeah, imagine if, instead of buying the cell component cards, you're actually buying new organs that you get to kind of like lay out to make your plants. That would be fun.

Jason Wallace  48:09  
It would be, I think I actually do prefer this to cytosis, because it is more mechanically complex than more ways to go out and when this is just the one thing was like that just feels a little strange, but the rest of it, I think, is quite well done. And notice none of us are bringing up science nitpicks, because genius games includes an entire booklet telling us about all the science in this game and where they made compromises in order for the sake of gameplay.

Brian  48:31  
So I they even mentioned plant pathogens twice, which is way more than you would usually hear about them.

Matt  48:38  
Yeah, I do. I think I do, and it's more of like a philosophical science nitpick, and it's just the element of, like, what is the main competition of this game? And yes, it was just, it's odd to me, because building a cell wall now I again, I'm a huge fan of competition as a component of all aspects of life. I think it gets kind of poo pooed, because we want to all get along as humans. So we're like, no plants get along. No, they don't. They're competing with each other. But I think the competition within the self, the organism, we could kind of calm that one down a little bit. And I don't think cell walls is the most competitive process of a plant's life cycle. And so again, I think we'd be changing the game a lot to kind of accommodate that. And I just thought it was weird to focus on the cell wall. I'm not a game designer too, so I want to give these people the credit that they're due for, like, creating something out of knowing they were making it a sequel. But, yeah, building a cell wall doesn't seem very competitive, or at least from a scientific perspective, to me

Brian  49:34  
in Cytosis Jason and I, because I agree, both of these games kind of have the biggest problem of, who am I as the player? What am I? What is my role?

Jason Wallace  49:43  
It's the central metaphor, like, Okay, what exactly am I playing in this like, which is not necessary, but it's one of the things that does help you kind of grok it a little

Brian  49:51  
bit better. So in Cytosis, we decided, Oh, I'm a transcription factor, and my little workers are kinesins. In fact, we designed little kinesin the little motor Proteins that look like Mickey's brooms from Fantasia, that kind of go around and walk around and do all the work inside the cell. It's like, okay, we are competing transcriptional programs trying to do different things inside the cell. That completely breaks for cellulose. There's no way to make that work, because you're trying to do the same thing, right? You're literally, you're, competing with each other to do one thing. It's, it's very strange.

Jason  50:24  
I know maybe you're some sort of master regulator, or we're probably stretching it too far. It's like, if we're trying, we're trying to force a unifying metaphor on this game, when the reality is that in order for it to be a game, it just had to be kind of like this, right? Yeah.

Matt  50:38  
And I, at its core, I do want to kind of celebrate the idea that it's teaching you, at least in some aspects, trade offs, right? Like, not everything is this infinite generator, not everything can be optimized in every way, shape or form.

Jason Wallace  50:50  
Cytosis was definitely the first game, and I think it was, it was successful. And then the thought was, well, how can we do this for plant cells, which I am going to applaud them for, because, again, most people don't even think about plants. So I am very happy that they decided to take on that challenge. And I'm actually very happy with the level it came out, which maybe this is the point where we transition to grades. Brian,

Brian  51:12  
Let's do grades. Let's talk about so we are we are professors. We give our games grades. We give it a grade on science accuracy, and we give it a grade on fun. We'll just kind of do those back to back. And Jason, why don't you go ahead and lead us out on this conversation?

Jason Wallace  51:27  
Okay, for science accuracy, I'm going to give it a solid A so again, my metric for this is basically, does it try? Does it show accurate science? Is it, especially if it's honest about where it makes compromises, and does it succeed at showing what it's trying to do? And I think this succeeds. I mean, most genius games come out at A's on science, because they really do their work. There's a lot of stuff in here. It's, again, the sort of thing where, if someone plays this game, and then they go through, like, a plant biology course, and they go through cells like, oh yeah. I recognize that. I understand how the things go together, and even the little things, like you don't have to have the water drop when you take carbon dioxide. It's a kind of interesting mechanic in there, but the fact that it represents a real important trade off for plants is, I think, actually quite nice. And so I think the science is, as usual, top notch for gameplay. I would give it probably an A minus. Like I said, I actually prefer it to cytosis, because I think it's more complex with the fact that you can get protein engines going, the fact that you have control over the length of the game by building the cellulose chain, the fact that the vacuole, we didn't talk about this, but there's actually a little bit of a mini competition there for control of the vacuole, because it gives you an extra action that turn if you manage to get it, it gives several different places to strategize around the one off part, like we mentioned, is that the plant growth just stops mattering partway through the game. But everything else, I think, is more mechanically complex and more mechanically rich. And so I'm probably going to give an A minus, and that minus is only because the plant, the plant growth, stops mattering.

Brian  53:04  
I think I'm right with you, Jason, I gotta be honest. Probably the same science grade and fun grade. When does anybody talk about the vacuole, let alone make it central to how you think about a plant cell? I use a slightly different metric for the science. It's how much science are you going to learn by accident, just by having fun playing this game? You're going to learn six, water, six. Carbon dioxide makes a sugar. You're going to learn about the vacuole. More than I've ever seen anybody even talk about a vacuole in a lecture, in addition to all the normal sort of stuff about photosynthesis, I love that the growth hormone, they actually made little wooden meeples that look like cytokinin, for no particular reason. They could have picked any hormone. And they did simplify it down to just one that's cytokinin. We looked it up, which

Jason  53:53  
is a card in the game, actually, which is another incidental learning. All the cards are real plant enzymes, real plant hormones. They have Rubisco in there. I think it's the one that gives you an extra photosynthesis action. It's like that, you're right. There's gonna be a lot of incidental learning happening as you play this game. Yep.

Brian  54:10  
Sort of like a genius game Specialty is all that sort of learning that happens by along the way. And I agree with you on fun too. I think this is, this is an A minus. This is, I'm trying to decide if this is gonna make it into a regular rotation. I guess the next time we're feeling the inspiration to play cytosis, maybe we're playing cellulose instead.

Jason  54:29  
Yep, nice. What about you, Matt? What do you think? And you can abstain if you want, because some people aren't comfortable gradings. But oh no, I don't it is fun, kind of judging things. No.

Matt  54:39  
I mean, this is like, you're you're opting to play this game. You're either subjecting people to it as a tool or at a game night trying to have fun, right? And so I think, yeah, I'm with you guys, a A on science. It's cool to see at least these things associated with each other, getting kind of the basic numbers and and doing that association of trade offs. To me, that's really neat. And that vacuole element, I think, was probably the. Favorite part of this was just how different that kind of it added a layer of strategy. Yeah, it could have been fleshed out a little bit more in terms of that plant growth element. But, you know, you can only put so much into a game that you can play in an evening, right? There's definitely longer versions of this that, over time could be developed. Fun wise, though I'm going to be a little bit more brutal. I would put this at like a B, B minus for me, just in terms of, it's fun, it's different. I again, anything that puts plants first is kind of, in my mind, this felt a little like it could have cooked a little longer. And like I said, it did feel a little sequely to me. Is like, Hey, we gotta, let's make a plant one and a little bit more time maybe thinking about different elements of it. Overall gameplay, average worker placement to me, and I'm personally, if I'm going into a board game night, I'm going there to have fun, if it's educational, that's a bonus. But, you know, at some point it just becomes a lot of words, and I could just see a lot of friends taking strategies just based on that, and to hell with the science behind it. So 100% Yeah, to me, it's fine. It's a solid game. I think it would be really worth having in a classroom, having around, but I don't know if it would become part of my regular rotation as a result. It's fair and

Brian  56:11  
actually, you helped us with our next transition. You can tell you're a podcaster, because the conversation just moves from point to point to point like this is something that we've started doing this season in particular, what is one of your favorite games? And it doesn't have to be a science game, great question. It doesn't even have to be a board game, but it would be

Matt  56:27  
cool if it was okay. Well, in that case, one of my favorites, and it's one that I keep coming back to, is it's another plant game. Oddly enough, it's photosynthesis. It was our very first episode. Yeah, I noticed you all had talked about it, so I don't want to step on too many toes, but to me, in terms of, like, the in terms of, like, the pacing, the thought process, the sort of ecosystem construction, I love how every game plays out and how it looks. I think it's kind of like a complete package. For me. In terms of, you can play a couple rounds with your friends, it looks really cool. Never Is it the same time and time again, there's enough strategy that no one kind of fixates and and just becomes that guy at the table right? To me, that's, that's like, I think that's a perfect sort of balance in terms of, you know, different strategies and stuff. Of course, there's plenty of different ways you can flesh that out in other ways, but that's, you know, what expansion packs are for. So that's, that's one of my favorite board

Brian  57:17  
games, you know, Jason, we haven't even played photosynthesis since that first episode, maybe we need to bring that out. The next time we get together, what do you say?

Jason  57:24  
Yeah, the problem is that since starting this podcast, we always have this queue of games we need to play. The games we've already played actually take a lower shift in the in the queue.

Matt  57:35  
Yeah, content creation, that's the devil of it, right? Careful what you do with your hobbies.

Jason Wallace  57:41  
Yeah, and like, our audience is there, like, all doing, like, the world's tiniest violin gesture. Oh, no, you're doing you get to have fun for as part of your job, poor you. It's like, no, no. It's like, we get it that we are lucky and blessed to be able to have this opportunity. It just helps some unanticipated side effects. Sure, 

Brian  57:59  
we get to have Matt come on and talk to us about a board game. How fun is that?

Matt  58:04  
Thanks. I appreciate that.

Jason  58:06  
So So Matt, as we wrap up, where can people find you? Yeah, I

Speaker 2  58:10  
am all over the the internet, as in defense of plans. It is mainly a podcast every week, new guest or rehashing some conversations I've had in the past when I need to, but it's, you know, I go to the experts. I'm not an influencer trying to influence you in any way. I'm not just reciting Wikipedia or papers that I've read. I am trying to get the experts on to talk about their science and to humanize it a little bit. It's a very fun kind of conversation. I've learned so much in the process, and I, you know, I hope you enjoy it. If you're into plants, ecology, conservation, that's really where we're at there, that that intersection between those three things, I'm on Instagram quite a bit with just photography and videos quirky. I like to throw in a little bit of the music tastes I have, because, like, that one person that chimes in, they're like, Heck, yeah, that band is awesome. You just made my day, friend.

Brian  59:00  
You have a very active Instagram, which is all just beautiful pictures of either plants or pieces of plants.

Matt  59:06  
Yes, yes, I do a lot of I love macro again, plants are these weird at all scales. So yeah, there, and that's pretty much it. I'm not too active on social media for mental health reasons. And you know, it's just wise, yeah, I try, but yeah, that's pretty much it. I have a book. You can get it wherever you get your books. It's in defense of plants and, yeah, just come enjoy the show, and let's celebrate everything plant related.

Brian  59:30  
Yay, from two plant scientists to another.

Matt  59:33  
Thank you. No, I appreciate it. This is a really fun idea and concept, and you kind of hit it right where it needs to hit in terms of that fun science combination. I was really stoked to learn about this show, and I can't wait to keep learning about these different games. You're going to introduce me to a bunch of new things I can corner my friends with on the weekends.

Jason  59:52  
Thank you. All right. Well, thank you.

Brian  59:52  
Okay, so thanks so much, Matt. We're going to go ahead and cut it there. Have a great month and great games

Jason Wallace  59:59  
and have fun playing. Dice with the universe and go see some plants. See you. This has been the

Brian  1:00:05  
gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai