She wants to understand the wisdom of plants

”This award is extremely valuable, so I am extremely honored and grateful to have received it. Looking at the laureates of this award, I believe the field of the research that Dr. Meitner pioneered is continuously developing. I have been conducting research in a laboratory, named radio-plantphpysiology, combining plant physiology with radiation science, so it is my great honor that my research in this newly created field has been evaluated,” says Tomoko M. Nakanishi.

Tomoko M. Nakanishi is a project professor at the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Laboratory of Radio-Plant Physiology, as well as professor emeritus of The University of Tokyo and of Hoshi University in Japan. She was awarded an honorary doctorate at Chalmers in 2019 for her outstanding interdisciplinary research on plant physiology and her research group is world-leading in radioisotope-based imaging methods for the uptake and utilisation of water and nutrition materials in plants.

”By using radioisotope (RI) and radiation and developing our own analyzing systems, we have been able to elucidate the new activities of living plants that were previously impossible to investigate. These include the discovery of the water circulation within plants, real-time imaging of carbon dioxide fixation from the air, visualization of root activity in the soil, etc. My research is particularly focused on this combined field where there are not many researchers, so I am extremely grateful that this award has supported me and allowed me to spread the word of this field to many people. I also believe that this award will help many people to recognize once again, what wonderful research tools radiation and isotopes are,” she says.

You receive the prize ”for developing unique and groundbreaking real-time in-vivo nuclear imaging methods to investigate the physiology of plants, and for their application to the thorough assessment of the agricultural and environmental consequences of the Fukushima accident." What drew you to these subjects initially? 
”My original specialty was radiochemistry. Even after my research field changed to plants, I still had a strong desire to somehow let more people know about the wonderful features of radiation and RI. Then the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred. I quickly began investigating the behavior of RI in the field using the research methods I had developed. Since the behavior of RI in the environment was not well known, even by researchers and the general public, I created an on-site RI behavior investigation group within the Faculty of Agriculture, at the University of Tokyo, and as the group leader and as a person in charge, conducted all radiation measurements. The discovery of knowledge from agricultural field surveys has continued for over 10 years, from the time of the accident in 2011 to the present and has deepened research in the laboratory. These results have been continuously announced to the world, leading to further research on environmental radioactivity.”

Do you have a particular current project or research direction that you would like to share?
”Carbon dioxide in the air is essential for plants, but little is known about its actual behavior after it is fixed in the plant. It is virtually impossible to investigate the real-time movement of carbon derived from carbon dioxide gas within the plant body using any method other than RI or radiation. I would like to know how plants make decision to transport carbon efficiently into their tissues and how they create the right skeleton, and the wisdom they demonstrate in this process.”

Why is this interesting to you?
”Plants use carbon from invisible carbon dioxide to create their visible bodies. Therefore, by visualizing and analyzing the invisible, I believe we may be able to discover wisdom possessed by plants that we have not been able to grasp or even think of it until now. I believe similar inferences can be made from the analysis of elemental dynamics. Furthermore, roots are a very important tissue in plants and seem to function as the human brain. How they grow in the soil is something we cannot see, but we would like to use our methods to visualize the activity to understand the wisdom possessed by roots, including how they require water and elements or how they move in the soil.”

What would be a dream discovery or a breakthrough for you and your research?
”Plants live on water and elements, and research has been mainly focused on analyzing the movement to explain or to induce the mechanism. However, real-time imaging analysis can provide some insight into the positive activities created by the plants, that is, the plant wisdom they use to move water and elements in smart way to survive. Plants undergo complex chemical reactions at room temperature, consuming little energy, and adapting to their environment. We hope that the results of these analyses will provide clues, how we can harness the wisdom inherent in plants in the future. I believe that understanding how to extract the wisdom of plants will bring about one of the biggest breakthroughs in plant research. Naturally, I hope that this result will also lead to the development of new agricultural science.”

The Lise Meitner ceremony 2025 will take place on September 18, 15:15 - 17:00 in Kollektorn at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience. 
A symposium in Professor Nakanishi’s honor will be held on September 19. 

Professor Nakanishi's nominators are:
Imre Pazsit (Chalmers)
Eva Forssell Aronsson (GU)