Ping Yu: The Blooms and Beyond podcast, a podcast that uncovers plant history, culture, and management
Ping Yu: through the lens of science. I'm your host, Ping. How's everyone doing today? I am doing
Ping Yu: great because here I have one of my fellow horticulturists, a previous Bulldawg, and my colleague
Ping Yu: and friend, Dr. Ryan Contreras from Oregon State University joining me today.
Ping Yu: And we're going to talk about one of the, I think, very important topics about applied
Ping Yu: breeding techniques, especially for ornamental.
Ping Yu: So I know he has tons of knowledge and story to share, so I don't want to steal any more
Ping Yu: thunder from the speaker today.
Ping Yu: Let's just jump right into it.
Ping Yu: Without further ado, here is my conversation with...
Ping Yu: Dr. Ryan Contreras. I hope you enjoy.
Ping Yu: So, hi Ryan. Welcome to the podcast. But first, let's start off with the
Ping Yu: introduction. Can you tell our audience a little bit about who you are and what
Ping Yu: you do? Ryan Contreras: Good morning, Ping. I appreciate the
Ryan Contreras: opportunity to get to speak with you today.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I am a professor at Oregon State University and
Ryan Contreras: I have been here since December 2009.
Ryan Contreras: I came straight from Tifton, Georgia.
Ryan Contreras: So I did my PhD with John Ruter.
Ryan Contreras: So I spent three terms finishing up coursework in Athens and getting started on research
Ryan Contreras: before I spent two years down in Tifton.
Ryan Contreras: Some of your listeners are probably familiar with that and with that location.
Ryan Contreras: I was really fortunate to get to work with Dr. Ruter.
Ryan Contreras: I had a lot of leeway and it was a really great opportunity to, I think, prepare without
Ryan Contreras: being a postdoc, but to prepare for the complete free reign of being a new professor.
Ryan Contreras: So when you start as a professor, there's not anyone there to hold your hand and tell
Ryan Contreras: you what to do.
Ryan Contreras: So this was a good opportunity working with Dr. Ruter. He gave me some guidelines as far as we're going to work on
Ryan Contreras: these crops
Ryan Contreras: But I got to do a lot of different things and so that was really exciting and plus when he was down there at his
Ryan Contreras: program, it was one of the great plant collections, especially conifers in the Southeast
Ryan Contreras: And of course, it doesn't exist anymore. But anyway, that was a really great opportunity
Ryan Contreras: Before I was in Georgia, I did my bachelor's and master's at North Carolina State
Ryan Contreras: I did my master's with Tom Ranney and again was at an off-campus location to do my research there.
Ryan Contreras: And of course Dr. Ranney leads a really large program up in Mills River, North Carolina.
Ryan Contreras: I'm maybe a little bit of an outlier as far as breeding goes.
Ryan Contreras: Many folks when they come through, you tend to bounce around and I would say
Ryan Contreras: probably fewer folks are still working on the same crop that they started with.
Ryan Contreras: But I'm super fortunate that during my undergraduate, toward the end of my undergraduate degree,
Ryan Contreras: I got to work with Denny Werner, who was working on Buddleja.
Ryan Contreras: And so I started, you know, that was my first exposure to plant breeding.
Ryan Contreras: And so I worked with Denny, who I'll give a quick plug, this is also a Georgia connection,
Ryan Contreras: but Dr. Shyam Tallury is a cytogeneticist.
Ryan Contreras: And he was previously at NC State, and that's where I was working with him.
Ryan Contreras: And he now is the curator of the peanut collection at the USDA in Griffin.
Ryan Contreras: which is fun. But he put me in touch with Shyam. I worked in peanut genetics for a couple years.
Ryan Contreras: But then since then, when I worked with Tom and then working with Dr. Ruter and then now here,
Ryan Contreras: I've been working on ornamentals, woody plants, basically my entire career other than two years in peanut genetics.
Ryan Contreras: So I think that's probably enough rambling about where I came from.
Ryan Contreras: I'm a North Carolina guy.
Ryan Contreras: I come from the beach of North Carolina.
Ryan Contreras: So being in Oregon, it does fit me, but it's pretty far away from where I started out.
Ping Yu: I was going to say, if you're from North Carolina, I mean, it's basically opposite.
Ping Yu: But well, temperature wise, well, it's not that extreme different in Oregon.
Ping Yu: Great place to live.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, it is interesting. I'm up near the 45th parallel here, but we're actually a Zone 8 where I am in the Willamette Valley.
Ryan Contreras: We're a very different Zone 8 than where I was in Tifton, Georgia.
Ping Yu: Of course.
Ryan Contreras: you know, with the amount of heat is vastly different.
Ryan Contreras: But it actually, yeah, we're more temperate here than even in eastern North Carolina where I'm from.
Ryan Contreras: So it's a good place to grow trees. We get cool and we generally stay cool and
Ryan Contreras: yeah, it's a good place.
Ping Yu: Yeah, and I know that you mentioned a lot of names throughout your
Ping Yu: trajectory and I have to tell you those are great breeders, researchers themselves, but also
Ping Yu: apparently a great mentor because they give you all those techniques and soft skills even
Ping Yu: that you normally don't get from grad school and those skills are actually the ones that
Ping Yu: make you successful.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, there's a much longer list.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: And if I could give one piece of advice if you have graduate students that are some of
Ryan Contreras: your listeners, which I'm sure there are, is take advantage of the folks that are willing
Ryan Contreras: to give you their time and listen to them.
Ryan Contreras: Again, the list of mentors is far longer.
Ryan Contreras: At NC State, I was around Craig Yencho, who is a legendary sweet potato breeder.
Ryan Contreras: I learned a lot from Paul Fantz in teaching plant ID.
Ryan Contreras: And at Georgia, Wayne Hanna is, again, he's been around and basically had three different
Ryan Contreras: careers.
Ryan Contreras: reinvented himself in different crops and, yeah, learned a lot from him and Dr.
Ryan Contreras: Peggy, as I say, Ozias-Akins. Yeah, there's just a massive amount of people, and what I
Ryan Contreras: think what often maybe gets left off of the or who gets left off of the the the
Ryan Contreras: thank you list is the technicians, man. That
Ryan Contreras: If you want to learn how to grow the stuff and how the day-to-day actually happens,
Ryan Contreras: Nathan Lynch and Joel Mowrey and Tom Eaker at NC State were the ones who were doing it on the day-to-day basis when I was there.
Ryan Contreras: And Nancy Hand and the other folks down in Georgia, yeah, I learned a ton from them.
Ryan Contreras: And another thing that I'll say is that you get to observe management styles and talk to those folks a lot.
Ryan Contreras: You get to learn what works and what doesn't work from a management standpoint.
Ryan Contreras: So that's, yeah, there's...
Ryan Contreras: Getting to this stage, there's a lot of folks to say thanks to.
Ping Yu: Yeah, I am with you.
Ping Yu: So, anyhow, Ryan, I've known you for a couple of years already.
Ping Yu: What first sparked your interest in horticulture in general?
Ping Yu: Do you see yourself as a nature kid growing up?
Ping Yu: Because we know you started your breeding, or ornamental breeding,
Ping Yu: towards the end of your college or bachelor's degree.
Ping Yu: Before that, how did you, do you know if horticulture is a thing?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, so I grew up, when I was a kid we had Coastal Bermuda hay, we had hogs and rabbits,
Ryan Contreras: and I actually grew up with, there were 32,000 laying hens.
Ryan Contreras: So it was chicken houses before automation, so it was picking up by hand.
Ryan Contreras: And all sorts of diversified farming on a small to modest scale.
Ryan Contreras: So I grew up in that fashion. I was in an ag program when I was in high school,
Ryan Contreras: and I had a really great example who wasn't my sister, but was basically my sister.
Ryan Contreras: If you're from the South, this is how it is. She was family, but not family.
Ryan Contreras: And she had gone to NC State and got a degree in Ag Ed and Extension, got a master's degree.
Ryan Contreras: And so I saw that as a really great career path.
Ryan Contreras: And I think like many folks who, if you come from an Ag, you know, a school that has an
Ryan Contreras: Ag program, I think there's a lot of greenhouses that are being used as greenhouses.
Ryan Contreras: So I had that and desire to...
Ryan Contreras: I wanted to go become the ag teacher, move back to Beaufort, go to East Carteret, be
Ryan Contreras: the ag teacher, and actually develop a horticulture program.
Ryan Contreras: So I thought that would be a really rewarding career path.
Ryan Contreras: So I started in ag ed and extension, and during my, I think it was my second semester, I was
Ryan Contreras: taking animal science and all of these other metalworking and things that I, it was fine.
Ryan Contreras: But then I took my first horticulture class and anybody who's from NC State knows Bryce
Ryan Contreras: Lane and Bryce is a super charismatic, compelling, amazing instructor.
Ryan Contreras: And after I took Bryce's class, I said, "Yeah, the other stuff is fine.
Ryan Contreras: This is what I want to do."
Ryan Contreras: And so then I transferred into horticultural science.
Ryan Contreras: And after that, for a long time I thought I wanted to be a grower.
Ryan Contreras: And I have a great story about why I decided to move from that.
Ryan Contreras: I was working at a nursery in Apex, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh, called Chewning
Ryan Contreras: Nursery, specialized in evergreen azaleas.
Ryan Contreras: And fantastic operator, fantastic nursery. I learned so much working there.
Ryan Contreras: But every summer, the owner, it was a small, small as far as there was only like four or five employees.
Ryan Contreras: And, but every summer.
Ryan Contreras: The owner and his partner, they would leave and go down to Wrightsville Beach for a beach
Ryan Contreras: volleyball tournament.
Ryan Contreras: And during that time, it's like August in North Carolina in the Piedmont, so insanely
Ryan Contreras: hot and I realized that basically I was the only thing standing between kind of financial
Ryan Contreras: ruin and this guy.
Ryan Contreras: So.
Ryan Contreras: To me, I couldn't deal with the stress of being chained to the nursery that hard and
Ryan Contreras: then having to turn it over because I was a college kid and I was probably more responsible
Ryan Contreras: than most, but at the same time, I, you know.
Ryan Contreras: It just, that stressed me out.
Ryan Contreras: And that cured me of wanting to be an owner/operator of a nursery.
Ryan Contreras: So I actually got interested in, started getting interested in research.
Ryan Contreras: And the first research that I thought sounded interesting was weed science.
Ryan Contreras: I thought that was fascinating, that you could conduct a career in research that would help
Ryan Contreras: solve
Ryan Contreras: especially at that time when I was out weeding all day, every day.
Ryan Contreras: I thought that was just the bee's knees.
Ryan Contreras: I then went and again toward the end of my career,
Ryan Contreras: I did my internship at a really interesting place.
Ryan Contreras: I was at Arizona State University,
Ryan Contreras: the Center for Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis with Ken Hoober.
Ryan Contreras: And it was completely basic science.
Ryan Contreras: we were radio labeling protein constituents and figuring out where these light-harvesting
Ryan Contreras: complex proteins were being assembled. I learned a lot of lab technique, but more importantly,
Ryan Contreras: I learned that what I wanted to do was not be in the lab 100% of the time in a windowless room
Ryan Contreras: radio labeling proteins.
Ryan Contreras: So that's when I came back and then I got working with Denny.
Ryan Contreras: I'm like a little bit of a hybrid.
Ryan Contreras: Like I don't have, I think I'm a little jealous of those folks that have the origin story.
Ryan Contreras: That's just really beautiful. My grandpa got me interested in petunias and this and that.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, a little bit of a circuitous route, but yeah, I come from agriculture and...
Ping Yu: But I think it's a great example of horticulture is part of the...
Ping Yu: agriculture and I actually talked to one of the ag teachers and I was just
Ping Yu: amazed how the education in ag program can really change some people's life
Ping Yu: and people just don't realize it.
Ping Yu: But anyhow let's talk about breeding because you like you said you have
Ping Yu: worked with different people.
Ping Yu: from row crops, economic crops like peanut,
Ping Yu: and then working with ornamental breeders and all that.
Ping Yu: So can you give us a overview of some of the
Ping Yu: applied technologies that has been used for breeding?
Ping Yu: And we know ornamental can be a little bit different
Ping Yu: because some of the techniques are not going to be used
Ping Yu: in ornamental.
Ping Yu: But just to give us an overview of the breeding techniques that you have learned over the years,
Ping Yu: and then we can talk more about the ornamental part.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I guess I'd start with breeding essentially is not a very complex science.
Ryan Contreras: Its essential nature of breeding is observing variation and then choosing something that's
Ryan Contreras: better for whatever trait is of interest.
Ryan Contreras: Yogi Berra, I think, he has all these great quotes, but Yogi Berra said, "You can learn
Ryan Contreras: a lot, or you can see a lot just by looking," or something like that.
Ryan Contreras: And I mentioned Wayne Hanna, his first publication, this was back in the day, but his first publication
Ryan Contreras: was in Science, and it was, I forget what the phenomenon was, but it was literally,
Ryan Contreras: he just was observant in a greenhouse and noticed something different in these maize
Ryan Contreras: plants than what was typically going on.
Ryan Contreras: Really, the most basic part of plant breeding and really what it is essentially is creating
Ryan Contreras: variation and then choosing plants from that variation.
Ryan Contreras: There's obviously all kinds of different ways to create variation and lots of different
Ryan Contreras: techniques.
Ryan Contreras: as far as, and it's different for self-pollinated crops versus outcrossers.
Ryan Contreras: I don't know that it's worth, and I'm certainly, I'm not a, I'm not the person to give a techniques
Ryan Contreras: lecture on plant breeding, but the most common way that we create variation is during sexual
Ryan Contreras: recombination. So when you make a cross or you collect seed, those plants, unless they're
Ryan Contreras: apomictic, have undergone some sexual recombination. Then we grow out those populations and look at those.
Ryan Contreras: the most common and easiest way to improve plants.
Ryan Contreras: We often hybridize good by good.
Ryan Contreras: So you're crossing elite by elite.
Ryan Contreras: And elite doesn't necessarily mean in every way, shape, or form.
Ryan Contreras: So for instance, I've done some work in Cotoneaster and my "elite by elite" often is I take something that works well in production, has a good shape, is otherwise good, and preferred by the industry, but it may lack fire blight resistance.
Ryan Contreras: So we've done this very thing where we then cross with something that has fire blight resistance,
Ryan Contreras: trying to get that good shape and form for the industry, but incorporating disease resistance.
Ryan Contreras: Let's see, I don't know what they're... So hybridization, open pollinated things,
Ryan Contreras: just taking advantage of natural genetic recombination is still going to be the most common.
Ryan Contreras: We use a lot of other techniques to incorporate or induce variation.
Ryan Contreras: I use a lot of ploidy manipulation,
Ryan Contreras: so that's just doubling or changing the number of copy of chromosome sets.
Ryan Contreras: So the most common reason for doing that in my program is to develop seedless forms.
Ryan Contreras: So bananas are triploids and that renders them seedless,
Ryan Contreras: so we're trying to do that on a lot of nursery crops.
Ryan Contreras: We do a lot of mutagenesis. There's non-targeted mutagenesis, which we use much more commonly.
Ryan Contreras: And you can use chemicals like ethyl methanesulfonate, which is EMS, or physical mutagens like x-rays or gamma rays.
Ryan Contreras: I'm fortunate that here on campus we have a radiation center and they have a number
Ryan Contreras: of different, they have fast neutrons and other sorts, but we use a cobalt source that
Ryan Contreras: is, it gives off gamma radiation.
Ryan Contreras: We have a source here and we, it's, you don't know what you're going to get.
Ryan Contreras: So the, the.
Ryan Contreras: The Forrest Gump, life is like a box of chocolates.
Ryan Contreras: We never know what we're going to get.
Ryan Contreras: We're just taking a shotgun and pointing it and
Ryan Contreras: blasting and then growing out populations of those looking for useful variation.
Ryan Contreras: Then more advanced techniques now as we are learning more about genomes and we have gene targets,
Ryan Contreras: we can do targeted editing.
Ryan Contreras: There's traditional transgenics and all of those sorts of technologies are still available.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I guess I didn't mention tissue culture, but that's certainly an important part of those
Ryan Contreras: of the more advanced techniques for gene editing or for transgenics. That's maybe
Ryan Contreras: you know aside from self-pollination or cross-pollinating and apomixis and there's other sexual
Ryan Contreras: like sex expression. The ability to conduct tissue culture or regeneration from undifferentiated
Ryan Contreras: callus is a major difference between our woody plants and many agronomic crops.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, we don't have the capacity to regenerate a lot of our plants from that undifferentiated callus.
Ryan Contreras: So that regeneration has become our bottleneck.
Ryan Contreras: That, in addition, we just have studied many of our plants a lot less.
Ryan Contreras: corn, cotton, soy, wheat, all of those things, they've been sequenced and sequenced and we've
Ryan Contreras: got high level, high quality, chromosome level genome assemblies and so we've got all of
Ryan Contreras: these gene targets and we just know a lot less about our woody plants.
Ryan Contreras: I don't know, Ping, I've rambled for a bit.
Ping Yu: I think you got most of the...
Ping Yu: You pretty much drew a big picture of the ornamental.
Ping Yu: It's not comparable because for some of the economic crops,
Ping Yu: like you mentioned, the row crops, soybean, maize, and other crops.
Ping Yu: they're only working on one plant.
Ping Yu: And look at us, we just have so many different plants
Ping Yu: to work with, so it's not our fault.
Ping Yu: It's actually a good opportunity for us to explore more.
Ping Yu: So what I'm hearing now is from the plant breeding techniques
Ping Yu: We typically have two categories.
Ping Yu: The traditional one would be the sexual,
Ping Yu: either crossing, hybridizing, and mass selection.
Ping Yu: Those are categories as the traditional one,
Ping Yu: where, like you said, you just go out and observe
Ping Yu: and then select the varieties which
Ping Yu: ever fit your goal to select the plant. And the second one would be like more modern or advanced
Ping Yu: techniques including the marker and genome editing and mutation like you mentioned. Maybe tissue
Ping Yu: culture may be part of that too. But in terms of because I remember before our recording you
Ping Yu: said for some of the row crops they do and even vegetables they do like for instance backcross.
Ping Yu: But we're not using that in ornamental.
Ping Yu: Can you tell us a little bit on that why we are not using backcross breeding that often in ornamental?
Ryan Contreras: Backcrossing is actually...
Ryan Contreras: So, in fact, I have four new hibiscus cultivars that are being released now.
Ryan Contreras: One reason that we might not use backcross in the most essential sense is
Ryan Contreras: woody ornamentals tend to suffer from inbreeding depression.
Ryan Contreras: And so we're always trying, they're highly heterozygous and many crops won't self-pollinate.
Ryan Contreras: So hibiscus is, Hibiscus syriacus is one that most cultivars have a very low, low rate of
Ryan Contreras: self-pollination.
Ryan Contreras: So even if you do self them, you get few or no seeds.
Ryan Contreras: And if you do get any, they tend to be a little bit weaker.
Ryan Contreras: So we typically are not going to.
Ryan Contreras: I take cultivar X, cross it with Y, and then take that progeny and backcross it to cultivar X.
Ryan Contreras: But there's like a, I'm calling it the pseudo-backcross that we're using with these hibiscus
Ryan Contreras: cultivars where we're taking hybrids of Hibiscus syriacus and Hibiscus paramutabilis that were
Ryan Contreras: already in existence and then we're doing what I'm again calling this sort of pseudo-backcross,
Ryan Contreras: back crossing to Hibiscus syriacus to improve.
Ryan Contreras: the cold hardiness of those.
Ryan Contreras: And so we've now got these tree-form hibiscus
Ryan Contreras: that are really vigorous and they grow like trees,
Ryan Contreras: but they have a little improved hardiness
Ryan Contreras: over those previously released cultivars of
Ryan Contreras: Tosca, Lohengrin, and Resi.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, but primarily, you don't want to...
Ryan Contreras: You don't want to keep a narrow genetic base when you're working in woody plants.
Ryan Contreras: They typically suffer from inbreeding depression.
Ryan Contreras: Backcrossing to one of the parents is going to continue narrowing that
Ryan Contreras: and you're likely going to get inbreeding depression.
Ping Yu: Yeah, so for folks who is wondering what is backcrossing,
Ping Yu: it is actually a process where you make a cross of a hybrid,
Ping Yu: which is the offspring with one of its parents.
Ping Yu: that's just put out there so people would understand more.
Ping Yu: So when you as a breeder, especially a woody breeder,
Ping Yu: that you work a lot on woody plant breeding,
Ping Yu: when you start a breeding program,
Ping Yu: where does the idea usually come from?
Ping Yu: Is that from a grower problem, a market gap,
Ping Yu: or just your personal curiosity?
Ping Yu: Probably it's a combination of all those,
Ping Yu: but can you give us an example of that?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, that is, it's great. It's the most fun part, I think, actually, is like coming up with the ideas.
Ryan Contreras: In my program, we're not the largest, but we're, I think, one of the more diverse.
Ryan Contreras: We have germplasm and small projects, at least, on close to 50 genera.
Ryan Contreras: And, yeah, the ideas, they do, they come from all of those places.
Ryan Contreras: I'll give you... so for 14 years I taught plant ID and just recently have stopped doing that.
Ryan Contreras: But one of the plants that I taught, that I taught it just because it was nearby, was Kolkwitzia amabilis.
Ryan Contreras: And...
Ryan Contreras: I taught it. We didn't have a good specimen on campus.
Ryan Contreras: I literally taught it. There was a seven-foot-tall privacy fence,
Ryan Contreras: and the plant was climbing over it and would come down onto the sidewalk.
Ryan Contreras: It's where we could access it on the sidewalk.
Ryan Contreras: But it's a plant that's been around for a long time.
Ryan Contreras: It's really hardy, bulletproof.
Ryan Contreras: We call it elk-proof because you'll find it in these old homesteads.
Ryan Contreras: but it was just giant. It just needed to be smaller. Another example I got here, I had not
Ryan Contreras: really encountered flowering currant, but man it flowers in the spring or in the early spring. It's
Ryan Contreras: one of the, it's kind of like forsythia. It's the harbinger of spring. And Ribes sanguineum is just
Ryan Contreras: gorgeous, but then after it flowers it's just leggy. And so those are examples where I'm just noticing
Ryan Contreras: I'm a gardener as well, and so that would be great.
Ryan Contreras: It just needs to be a little bit reined in.
Ryan Contreras: There are other times where... Laurocerasus.
Ryan Contreras: Huge crop, right?
Ryan Contreras: So we're the, Oregon is the number one producer of common cherry laurel, and that's one
Ryan Contreras: that growers...
Ryan Contreras: repeatedly come to.
Ryan Contreras: They want to solve cherry laurel or shot hole disease,
Ryan Contreras: and they want to solve the issue of seeds.
Ryan Contreras: Because there's out here,
Ryan Contreras: we have western cherry fruit fly.
Ryan Contreras: So you're limited on shipping to
Ryan Contreras: certain states because of western cherry fruit fly.
Ryan Contreras: Plus, it's a bit of a weedy species.
Ryan Contreras: That's long been a big priority.
Ryan Contreras: Similarly, maples. There are a number of really weedy species of maples. Oregon is
Ryan Contreras: also number one in shade trees and particularly in maples and so it's
Ryan Contreras: really economically important to our growers. There's other crops that you
Ryan Contreras: just stumble in because they're fun and there's a lot of diversity.
Ryan Contreras: I had the opportunity to go to Santa Cruz Arboretum early in my career and I was probably
Ryan Contreras: a hundred feet away from a Philadelphus madrensis and the fragrance from it was just insane.
Ryan Contreras: I got up on this plant and it was incredible.
Ryan Contreras: So we took cuttings and brought it back.
Ryan Contreras: And that triggered a whole Philadelphus breeding program.
Ryan Contreras: You know, I'd be lying if I didn't say
Ryan Contreras: there are times when I look at trends
Ryan Contreras: in the nursery industry.
Ryan Contreras: If you're chasing a current trend, you're too far behind.
Ryan Contreras: I'll say that.
Ryan Contreras: But there is some level of trying to predict
Ryan Contreras: what's going to be hot.
Ryan Contreras: And I do that.
Ryan Contreras: I'm not a marketing person, but I try to observe that.
Ryan Contreras: But it's more talking to growers.
Ryan Contreras: I spend a lot of time
Ryan Contreras: Not as much as I would like these days. I'm in my office too much.
Ryan Contreras: But I talk to growers a lot and try to see what are their pain points.
Ryan Contreras: Labor is a pain point and
Ryan Contreras: it doesn't matter where you are. Labor is a pain point.
Ryan Contreras: We do try to grow plants, or try to develop plants that are going to have fewer touches in production.
Ryan Contreras: We have a few promising selections. We've got a... I guess I maybe shouldn't say.
Ryan Contreras: But we have a few things that are coming out that that's really the improvement.
Ryan Contreras: Is that they root easier, they remain more compact, and they just require fewer prunings during the production process.
Ryan Contreras: We are maybe...
Ryan Contreras: My consumers, of course, we want home gardeners to enjoy our plants or
Ryan Contreras: landscapers or whatever, but really my first and most immediate stakeholders
Ryan Contreras: and my customers are the wholesale nursery industries.
Ryan Contreras: It has to work for them. It doesn't matter how beautiful and gorgeous the plant is.
Ryan Contreras: If you can't make more of it and you can't make any money on growing it,
Ryan Contreras: then it's not going to go anywhere.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: One more, just in my final, and I'll let you ask your next question,
Ryan Contreras: but brands are really, have reshaped all of this.
Ryan Contreras: So, yeah, I am trying to work with all of them.
Ryan Contreras: So we do have some really close relationships with a couple of companies and a couple of brands.
Ryan Contreras: But I'm trying to work with everyone because we, being a public breeder, I do think I take that seriously.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I want to make sure that we're helping the whole industry and not just one or two.
Ryan Contreras: But yeah, the brands have just completely...
Ryan Contreras: So I listen, I try to listen to those folks because they're much more savvy about what
Ryan Contreras: sells and what doesn't.
Ryan Contreras: Because at the end of the day, I don't make money, whether the plants sell or not, I've
Ryan Contreras: got my salary.
Ping Yu: Yeah, and also they have the data, the first-hand data that can tell them the popularity of
Ping Yu: a certain plant.
Ping Yu: And like you said, we...
Ping Yu: don't. You cannot, if you are predicting the... or following the current trend,
Ping Yu: it'll be too far behind. It's really something that I call breeders. If we're
Ping Yu: in a fashion industry, I call them the fashion designers, because especially
Ping Yu: woody ornamentals for breeding, and if you want to create a new
Ping Yu: cultivar that will become popular, you have to trace back to start
Ping Yu: working it maybe 10 years beforehand before it can hit to the market and
Ping Yu: becoming the next fashion in the market so it really is a hard work and
Ping Yu: long process, just for taking one plant out, just to make one plant to the
Ping Yu: market.
Ryan Contreras: You know, maybe that's the good news is that it takes so long
Ryan Contreras: but you don't really need to chase the trend, because if you've ever heard Dr. Dirr talk about the plant clock
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm.
Ryan Contreras: you would think that it's like fashion. Like you mentioned fashion, and now the clothing from the '90s when I was in
Ryan Contreras: high school is, like, back in fashion now.
Ryan Contreras: So everything is gonna come back around and it takes me 17 years to release a cultivar. So
Ryan Contreras: Who knows what's going to be hot in 17 years.
Ryan Contreras: That's why we work on so many different crops.
Ping Yu: Yeah, yeah.
Ping Yu: So over your career, I know you have so many different breeding programs going on,
Ping Yu: sometimes simultaneously, but which breeding techniques have you found yourself relying on the most?
Ping Yu: And which surprised you by being less useful?
Ryan Contreras: Oh man, I should one day look it up and see exactly when he made this quote, but Norman
Ryan Contreras: Borlaug, as I say it all the time, he was asked, "How do you become a great wheat breeder?"
Ryan Contreras: And he says, "You go to the field, and you go to the field some more, and when the wheat
Ryan Contreras: plants start to talk to you, you've made it."
Ryan Contreras: So the most useful techniques, far and away, in my observation, are being out there, walking
Ryan Contreras: the plots, seeing what the plants are doing on a regular basis, not just once a year,
Ryan Contreras: but frequently.
Ryan Contreras: and getting input from growers.
Ryan Contreras: Whether that's in my own plots or
Ryan Contreras: distributing plants under a material transfer agreement
Ryan Contreras: and having them grow them in their own place.
Ryan Contreras: I get way more from that.
Ryan Contreras: It also is the most surprising and sometimes the most frustrating
Ryan Contreras: where I think something is just
Ryan Contreras: the greatest thing since sliced bread
Ryan Contreras: and it either doesn't work,
Ryan Contreras: has some great fault in production, or whatever.
Ryan Contreras: What has been disappointing? I don't know if it's disappointing or surprising, but I guess I continually...
Ryan Contreras: Every time I see a graduate seminar on QTLs and marker-assisted breeding, I always ask,
Ryan Contreras: How has that directly translated into a new cultivar coming out?
Ryan Contreras: And I think, yeah, there are really great examples.
Ryan Contreras: So I mentioned peanut breeding, there was nematode resistance,
Ryan Contreras: they had a rapid marker. Right next door is the hazelnut breeding program
Ryan Contreras: that has been insanely successful on breeding for eastern filbert blight resistance
Ryan Contreras: using marker-assisted breeding.
Ryan Contreras: So there are really great examples out there.
Ryan Contreras: But I...
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, we don't use a ton of that.
Ryan Contreras: And so that's, we are doing work in that realm, especially on lilacs because it takes
Ryan Contreras: a long time to phenotype them.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I guess that's, and this is advice I got from mentors long ago, is ask why are
Ryan Contreras: we doing this?
Ryan Contreras: Now, an okay answer is if you're a new professor and to get publications, advance the science,
Ryan Contreras: learn something more that's foundational, that's a valid reason.
Ryan Contreras: So I'm not saying that this work isn't important, but I will say if your goal is
Ryan Contreras: you know, cultivar development, ask yourself, like, is this getting me closer to a cultivar?
Ryan Contreras: And I've yet to see anything that is more, that gets us there quicker than creating variation,
Ryan Contreras: whether it's mutation, polyploidization, crossing, open pollination, whatever,
Ryan Contreras: growing them out and then looking at them.
Ryan Contreras: Dr. Dirr, it could be argued whether he was a plant breeder or not, but I would say absolutely
Ryan Contreras: he's a plant breeder because even though he used a lot of open pollination, he looked
Ryan Contreras: at the variation, selected something that's superior, and moved it ahead.
Ryan Contreras: And that is plant breeding.
Ping Yu: And I think that might be one of the techniques that you use regularly,
Ping Yu: or most of the breeders use regularly,
Ping Yu: but some students may not realize how important it is.
Ping Yu: Based on your description, they were like,
Ping Yu: "Oh, that's boring and everybody can do it."
Ping Yu: It doesn't require a whole lot of skill set,
Ping Yu: maybe from their perception,
Ping Yu: but it is actually the essential technique for breeding.
Ryan Contreras: I would say, I think of it like at a lot of nurseries, the lowest paid person is the most
Ryan Contreras: important person, it's the watering.
Ping Yu: Yes.
Ryan Contreras: Right?
Ryan Contreras: It's insane.
Ryan Contreras: And it takes a lot of nuance and a lot of skill and nothing is more important than making
Ryan Contreras: sure that everything has the right amount of water.
Ryan Contreras: and it's a difficult skill to develop.
Ryan Contreras: I think of it like walking rows or looking at plants and just having the eye for what's better.
Ryan Contreras: And, you know, it could be argued that no one has ever had a better eye than Dr. Dirr.
Ryan Contreras: I've got a plant that is currently being evaluated or considered by a major plant brand,
Ryan Contreras: and it was just a seedling that's here on campus.
Ryan Contreras: I go to lunch in a building that's nearby, and I observed it and said, "Man, that is
Ryan Contreras: different and that is better than what I have seen in the industry."
Ryan Contreras: You can look down on these as being not fancy technology, but it's about what your goal
Ryan Contreras: is.
Ryan Contreras: If your goal is to introduce something that's better,
Ryan Contreras: I don't think you... You don't have to be running markers or doing CRISPR or anything fancy.
Ping Yu: Yes.
Ping Yu: Since we're talking about this,
Ping Yu: can you just give us an example where you say
Ping Yu: the classic techniques and just go out there in the field and look at the plants,
Ping Yu: kind of outperformed more advanced or sexy high-tech approach?
Ping Yu: I mean, we're not here to say that all those high-tech approaches are not as important
Ping Yu: as the traditional ones, but sometimes, you know, you kind of have to combine those two
Ping Yu: to reach your goal, as you said, depending on what your goal is.
Ryan Contreras: That is an interesting question. I guess it would be lilacs because that's the only one where I can compare both of them.
Ryan Contreras: We're working toward, so we've been sequencing lilacs and we've done genotyping by sequencing and we have some markers that are associated with reblooming.
Ryan Contreras: And we've been working on that since...
Ryan Contreras: 2013 and still don't have what I would consider to be really useful and
Ryan Contreras: identified, validated, effective markers. So that'd be my best example. And I
Ryan Contreras: think not from my own program but
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I see in my colleagues there's these students are doing really fantastic work.
Ryan Contreras: They've identified these QTLs that explain lots of the variation, but at the end of the
Ryan Contreras: day that's not how the cultivars got developed.
Ping Yu: What about using some of those high-end, high-tech approach to kind of confirm?
Ping Yu: your field observation. Do you have an example of that?
Ping Yu: Or sometimes the observation and the technology results might be contradictory.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I mean, we do have SNP markers that are related to reblooming.
Ryan Contreras: And so we're going to turn those into markers.
Ryan Contreras: And so we absolutely, that's at the end of the day,
Ryan Contreras: we will ultimately validate our field observations for reblooming.
Ryan Contreras: And we want to tie all that together.
Ryan Contreras: And that's gone down this trail a little bit.
Ryan Contreras: That's part, to me, part of the larger knowledge-seeking that's going to benefit lots of crops.
Ryan Contreras: In horticulture, there's a lot of...
Ryan Contreras: Remontancy and reblooming is huge.
Ryan Contreras: You could argue that it started with Buddy Lee on Encore azaleas, but Encore azalea, Endless
Ryan Contreras: Summer hydrangeas, Knock Out roses, those things revolutionize those genera for what people
Ryan Contreras: expect.
Ryan Contreras: Now, you can hardly sell it unless it blooms either continuously or at least more than
Ryan Contreras: once or on new wood.
Ryan Contreras: You can't really sell hydrangea, rose, or azalea.
Ryan Contreras: So those have really changed it.
Ryan Contreras: But we are trying to do gene discovery and identify markers that are associated with
Ryan Contreras: those.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, so at the end of the day, we want to validate.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, these traits especially, the environment plays a huge role.
Ryan Contreras: And you can manipulate, a good example is 'Palibin' lilac is non-reblooming.
Ryan Contreras: It doesn't, I don't think it has the genes for reblooming.
Ryan Contreras: But if you shear it at the right time of year in early spring, it will flower in July.
Ryan Contreras: And I've seen growers do that.
Ryan Contreras: Van Essen Nursery, I'll never forget, it was late July and I showed up at their nursery
Ryan Contreras: and 'Palibin' was in full bloom.
Ryan Contreras: And that was because of how they had manipulated the environment.
Ryan Contreras: So it's not, that's a different thing than remontancy.
Ryan Contreras: And so we want to make sure that we're not inadvertently doing something weird in our environment that is causing our plants to re-bloom.
Ryan Contreras: We're trying to make sure that there is a gene there.
Ryan Contreras: And then, oh by the way, you know, if we can figure out what the mechanism is for lilac, what it is for hydrangea, what it is for rose, and what it is for azalea,
Ryan Contreras: then maybe down the road when we have...
Ryan Contreras: better technology or we figured out new ways and there's already been a lot of new work that's done in
Ryan Contreras: introducing
Ryan Contreras: CRISPR technology through non-tissue-culture-based methods.
Ryan Contreras: So that's going to be another huge leap forward if we don't have to go to
Ryan Contreras: undifferentiated callus tissue and then regenerate plants.
Ryan Contreras: If we can introduce it through other means, that would be a huge benefit.
Ping Yu: But we talk about the breeding goals and there's a lot of breeding goals depending on what plants
Ping Yu: you are working on. For instance, you talk about the lilac reblooming and some plants are disease
Ping Yu: resistant and making it more compact basically making the whole plant better.
Ping Yu: But can you share a story where your kind of breeding goal changed halfway through because
Ping Yu: the reality hit?
Ping Yu: Because ideally you want everything to work and then you have the perfect plant, but there
Ping Yu: are things that we cannot change.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, so I had, one of my early ideas when I came here, I had worked on Japanese cedar
Ryan Contreras: using polyploidization.
Ryan Contreras: Oregon leads the nation in arborvitae production.
Ryan Contreras: And I drive down the road and there's these arborvitae with mostly 'Smaragd' or 'Emerald
Ryan Contreras: Green'.
Ryan Contreras: And during the winter, it turns that rhodoxanthin brown, brown or red or purpley.
Ryan Contreras: And so I had this idea that I could develop polyploids that would be non-winter-browning.
Ryan Contreras: And I went and spoke with the folks at A&R Spada Farms.
Ryan Contreras: I had already been doing this work and would go in very excited about this idea and he
Ryan Contreras: just said, "I don't care about that."
Ryan Contreras: And so I said, "Do you get calls about these things turning brown?"
Ryan Contreras: He says, "Oh yeah, every year we get some calls."
Ryan Contreras: I tell them to wait two months and then they're going to turn green.
Ryan Contreras: And they do and then they don't call back.
Ryan Contreras: That was the answer.
Ryan Contreras: And he said, "But if you could give me spruce spider mite resistance,
Ryan Contreras: because that's, throughout the industry, that's a major issue.
Ryan Contreras: So that impacts the bottom line.
Ryan Contreras: They don't want to have to put out this active ingredient.
Ryan Contreras: It costs money. There's additional chemicals in the environment.
Ryan Contreras: And so that was one that...
Ryan Contreras: But finding that source of resistance is the trick.
Ryan Contreras: And finding the source of resistance in something that will be compatible
Ryan Contreras: and give us something that has a similar phenotype, right?
Ryan Contreras: So we want it to look like 'DeGroot's Spire' or 'Smaragd', or
Ryan Contreras: you know, these other cultivars that are popular that people want.
Ryan Contreras: Oh, and by the way, we also want it to be deer resistant because arborvitae are highly
Ryan Contreras: attractive to deer.
Ryan Contreras: That's when you get to, "All right, I can't do spruce spider mite, the phenotype.
Ryan Contreras: Oh, it's got to be fast."
Ryan Contreras: So it's got to be compact, but it's got to be fast, but it also has to be deer resistant.
Ryan Contreras: So that's one where I'm a little bit stymied on how do we proceed. And we have some ideas on
Ryan Contreras: what where we're going to go from there. But but yeah, and I don't feel worried about sharing those
Ryan Contreras: ideas with with your audience because I certainly am not the first one to.
Ryan Contreras: To have all of these thoughts, it's something that people have been thinking about and looking for a long time.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: There's no shortage of nearly unattainable goals.
Ryan Contreras: We want a plant to get three feet in one year and then not grow anymore, require no fertilizer and flower 52 weeks a year.
Ping Yu: See, we just sometimes like, "Oh, we are too greedy for a plant."
Ping Yu: We want them to have it all.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, some have said that we as Americans, we're not okay enough with death and like during, like the change of the seasons
Ryan Contreras: Right? So at times, like, your garden might look like there's a lot of rot, and it's just like
Ryan Contreras: degrading, and that's good for next year, but I don't want my garden to look like that either, to be honest.
Ping Yu: Yeah, you always are looking for something to be to look at
Ping Yu: Throughout the year, that's just the human nature.
Ping Yu: But again, we're in ornamental, we're dealing with thousands of different plants and
Ping Yu: also, we are limited in
Ping Yu: time, labor,
Ping Yu: money. So can you tell us a little bit about how those factors actually decide
Ping Yu: of which, decide your breeding program and decide what you do on certain crops?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I mean it really is, it's all money.
Ryan Contreras: Trees are really expensive to grow, so that's a big consideration.
Ryan Contreras: I'm actually, I'm hoping to dig trees shortly, bare root them, and then re-space them so
Ryan Contreras: that they take up less space after I've chainsawed down 85% of them, the population.
Ryan Contreras: But really, it's a matter of what's the potential and what's the need.
Ryan Contreras: I've spent a lot of time making crosses and cherry laurels because it is a huge crop.
Ryan Contreras: We spend a lot of time on maples because it's a really important crop.
Ryan Contreras: I've probably spent too much time on hibiscus because it's not that big compared to cherry
Ryan Contreras: laurels or maples or boxwood.
Ryan Contreras: That's one where it's been kind of interesting, but they're very fast.
Ryan Contreras: And so I think that's kind of where I balance it.
Ryan Contreras: I can do many generations of hibiscus in the time when I have tetraploid Norway maples that have still never flowered that are developed in 2010 or 2011.
Ryan Contreras: It's all relative.
Ryan Contreras: To come back and answer your question, really, it's "Is anybody going to want it?" and "Is there a demand for it?"
Ryan Contreras: And if there's not a demand for it now, oftentimes what we'll do is just...
Ryan Contreras: shrink it. We don't, I don't, anything that's generally improved I'm pretty
Ryan Contreras: hesitant to throw it away completely. Yeah. But we may shrink that program down
Ryan Contreras: to just about nothing. We don't throw it away, we might put it on mothballs so to
Ryan Contreras: speak. Ping Yu: Yeah. You never know when that trend might become popular again, like we
Ping Yu: mentioned before.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and really it just takes one person at a large grower to find a good niche for it.
Ryan Contreras: And so folks would say that Vaccinium ovatum is not a big crop,
Ryan Contreras: but it is specced a lot in landscapes here in the Pacific Northwest.
Ryan Contreras: And so we've got a plant that's with Briggs.
Ryan Contreras: It's probably underperformed from what they wanted and what we wanted.
Ryan Contreras: There's always tomorrow.
Ping Yu: Yeah, yeah.
Ping Yu: But over those years, have you ever had a plant that you really loved, but it's just
Ping Yu: not, the demand is just not there?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, absolutely.
Ryan Contreras: One of my first plants that I thought was a home run no-brainer, it's a hybrid.
Ryan Contreras: It's a triploid hybrid Cotoneaster.
Ryan Contreras: It's got pink flowers, good fall color, good form.
Ryan Contreras: It withstood 4 degrees Fahrenheit unprotected in a container, isolated, not even jam can tight.
Ryan Contreras: So quite cold hardy.
Ryan Contreras: And it's fire blight resistant, never seen a strike on it anywhere.
Ryan Contreras: And it roots pretty well. It's not as fast as some other ones, but it is comparable to apiculatus.
Ryan Contreras: And nobody wants it because it doesn't have berries.
Ryan Contreras: And what we've been told is if it's a Cotoneaster that's deciduous, it has to have berries.
Ryan Contreras: And we're not...
Ryan Contreras: That's a great example of I'm not throwing it away, I don't have a big row of it anymore,
Ryan Contreras: but we're keeping a few of them just in case somebody has to come along.
Ryan Contreras: But yeah, that was a great one.
Ryan Contreras: It was an early, really excellent lesson and a reminder as to who I'm breeding plants for.
Ryan Contreras: I'm not breeding plants for what I think I want.
Ryan Contreras: I'm breeding plants for what people who are in the industry, what they need and what they want.
Ping Yu: Yeah, I think that's a very good quote.
Ping Yu: We're just biased for all those plant people.
Ping Yu: We love them all.
Ping Yu: We do find value or characteristics for each crop that can be, that need to be improved
Ping Yu: and that need to be appreciated more.
Ping Yu: But at the end of the day, it's a consumer, it's a gardener who is going to their local
Ping Yu: garden center and grab the plants and then we're like, okay, if they don't have that,
Ping Yu: then they're not going to buy the plant.
Ping Yu: So we are serving them, not us.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and I'll say not only am I not perfect, which that's obviously an understatement,
Ryan Contreras: but the nurseries and the brands and the whole process is not perfect.
Ryan Contreras: There are going to be plants that we introduce that are not going to be great.
Ryan Contreras: Dare I say I will introduce some dogs during my career, and there's one that I've introduced
Ryan Contreras: that...
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, it's probably, in hindsight, probably shouldn't have been released.
Ryan Contreras: And there's going to be more as we go through my career.
Ryan Contreras: There's going to be more plants that, yeah, probably didn't need to release that.
Ryan Contreras: That wasn't the improvement that it could have been or should have been, or I could
Ryan Contreras: have tested it in more places.
Ryan Contreras: But at the end of the day, we're just moving ahead.
Ryan Contreras: I'm trying to, yeah.
Ryan Contreras: I like this quote, it says "find peace and move with urgency"
Ping Yu: Yes.
Ryan Contreras: So that's what I'm trying to do, like trying to be calm and think about things critically
Ryan Contreras: but like we...
Ping Yu: Yeah
Ping Yu: So when we're training the next generation, because I know you also teach
Ping Yu: When training students, which techniques do you insist that the students master first?
Ryan Contreras: Master? I don't know that I've mastered any of this.
Ping Yu: Or learn first.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, no, I...
Ryan Contreras: And it depends at what stage.
Ryan Contreras: If it's an undergraduate, master's, or PhD student,
Ryan Contreras: it's a very different thing.
Ryan Contreras: But what I impress upon all students as early as possible is,
Ryan Contreras: you better learn how the plants are grown.
Ryan Contreras: It doesn't matter if you're a hazelnut breeder, a blueberry breeder, or a woody plant breeder.
Ryan Contreras: You need to understand how the plants are grown, what are the pain points of the growers
Ryan Contreras: and the consumer.
Ryan Contreras: What are you breeding for?
Ryan Contreras: And how is the plant grown?
Ryan Contreras: If you don't know that, then you're not going to be successful.
Ryan Contreras: And then we go look at plants.
Ryan Contreras: We look at them in the field a lot.
Ryan Contreras: For my particular program, I don't let anyone leave without doing some ploidy analysis,
Ryan Contreras: some flow cytometry.
Ryan Contreras: They've got to get on the microscope, look at pollen under the microscope.
Ryan Contreras: We try to get people to look at chromosomes, but that's a difficult technique.
Ryan Contreras: You can spend years without really getting that down.
Ryan Contreras: and everybody does some propagation.
Ryan Contreras: Everybody does a little seed processing.
Ryan Contreras: Really the nuts and bolts things.
Ryan Contreras: We stick some cuttings.
Ryan Contreras: I want people to understand
Ryan Contreras: how our plants work when they leave
Ryan Contreras: and know...
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, like how you make more of it.
Ryan Contreras: We try to make a lot of nursery visits, but as I said, sitting in an office too much.
Ryan Contreras: It's tough to be a good plant breeder when you're sitting in an office, but it's the
Ryan Contreras: nature of our job these days.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ping Yu: With that in mind, if people want to get more information of your lab and follow along your
Ping Yu: work,
Ping Yu: we're just keeping in touch with you. Where do you recommend to them go and find this information?
Ryan Contreras: If you go to horticulture.oregonstate.edu and you go under people, you can find my lab there.
Ping Yu: I'll put the link, I already have that link in the document, but I'll make sure I put a link
Ping Yu: in on the show notes too so that people can find that.
Ping Yu: very easily. But Ryan, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me
Ping Yu: and those information are just valuable for anyone, either students or growers or breeders
Ping Yu: to just hopefully get some out of this and the goal is to grow better plants and appreciate more plants.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and I really appreciate getting to talk with you, Ping.
Ryan Contreras: And I'll give a quick plug.
Ryan Contreras: I know that you're involved with IPPS, and I would encourage if there are any students
Ryan Contreras: that are listening to this, we all think about being involved with ASHS and ISHS, but I really
Ryan Contreras: encourage students to get involved with IPPS because that's where you go, you meet growers,
Ryan Contreras: you go see these operations, and you really, to seek and share is the motto, and it's really
Ryan Contreras: important.
Ryan Contreras: It's where the rubber meets the road.
Ryan Contreras: I would encourage that.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: But yeah, thanks again.
Ryan Contreras: It was really fun talking with you, Ping.
Ryan Contreras: That's cool.
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Ping Yu: Thank you for listening, till the next time, stay healthy and go plants!