![]() ![]() ![]() The team ran experiments with dozens of types of common foliage, including ivy, bamboo, peppermint, and banana leaves. In their paper, Bourouiba and Tristan Gilet, of the University of Liege, first addressed a widely held assumption: that pathogens coat leaves in a thin film. "Polyculture is an old concept if you look at native cultures, but this is one way to scientifically show that by alternating plants in one field, you can mechanically and naturally reduce the range of transmission of a pathogen during rainfall." "We can start thinking of how to smartly reinvent polyculture, where you have alternating species of plants with complimentary mechanical properties at various stages of their growth," says Bourouiba, who is a senior author of the paper. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, says understanding the relationship between a plant's mechanical properties and the spread of disease may help farmers plant more disease-resistant fields. Lydia Bourouiba, the Esther and Harold E. ![]() The researchers observed characteristic patterns of dispersal, and found that the range of dispersal depends on a plant's mechanical properties-particularly its compliance, or flexibility. As seen in high resolution, these raindrops can act as a dispersing agent, in some instances catapulting contaminated droplets far from their leaf source. In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a team from MIT and the University of Liege, in Belgium, presents high-speed images of raindrops splashing down on a variety of leaves coated with contaminated fluid. While historical weather records suggest that rainfall may scatter rust and other pathogens throughout a plant population, the mechanism by which this occurs has not been explored, until now. ![]()
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