On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Isaiah Kaufman.

Isaiah is currently attending Goshen College with a major in Biochemistry, interested in researching plant biology. He is participating in an REU program through the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, working in the Sharkey lab.

With the Sharkey Lab, he is researching plant resilience to temperature changes in relation to a small molecule called isoprene that many plants emit. Plants release an estimated 550 million tons of isoprene annually. It is important in understanding how plants on a global scale respond to temperature changes from day to day and from season to season, as well as in understanding how they will respond to a changing climate. It has been shown that isoprene leads to heat resistance; his work this summer is focused on measuring how isoprene-emitting plants respond to cold stress.

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