This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Solving science mysteries for a better world.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: If you don’t take risks, you don’t get very far.

Jocelyn Hittle: Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University Spur campus in Denver, Colorado.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Honestly, I think it starts with curiosity. I think that’s probably the most important trait of a scientist. All right, I’m gonna go for it. And I did, it was very hard.

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast we talk with experts in food, water, and health about how they are tackling big challenges we face in these three areas. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, and I’m joined today by Dr. Ana Cristina Fulladolsa, Director of CSU’s Plant and Soil Health Diagnostic Laboratory. Dr. Fulladolsa collaborates with other scientists and educators to address the needs of Colorado stakeholders in ag. She has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Plant Pathology and a Bachelor’s in Ag Production Systems from the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. Welcome, Ana Cristina.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Thank you, Jocelyn, I’m excited to be here.

Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks for joining us. So let’s start with what it means to manage the Plant and Soil Health Diagnostic Lab, it’s a bit of a mouthful. Can you tell us a little bit about what the lab is and what it does?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yes. So what those labs do is they provide diagnostic services, soil, water, and plant testing services as well for Colorado stakeholders and other stakeholders from outside of Colorado. Our clients are a very diverse, and so we receive samples from homeowners, farmers, researchers, consultants, and government agencies, et cetera and they’re all looking for us to help them figure out if their plants and their soil are healthy, and if there’s something that they need to do to improve that for a higher production and productivity of whatever plants they’re growing.

Jocelyn Hittle: As I understand it, the laboratory takes samples that are sent in either from individuals, so I could send in a sample from my backyard, like a soil sample or maybe something from one of my tomato plants in my garden and ask you, what do you see in this soil sample or about this plant sample that might help me be a better gardener? Am I on track so far?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yes, yes, very much so. So we on a daily basis, we receive samples, as I said, from people around the state and what they wanna know is okay, right now I put my little plantlet in my garden and it just isn’t looking so well, it’s maybe a little yellow, smaller than it was last year, or it has some browning on the leaves or it just doesn’t look right. And so they’ll send it to us and say, can you tell me what this is and how can I help this plant grow, and what can I do so that I can prevent this from happening again in the future?

Jocelyn Hittle: And the same with the soil, right? So I could send in a soil sample and you would tell me kind of, it’s got enough of this, it doesn’t have enough of that and here’s our recommendation for how to do it better?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: That’s correct. So one of the advantages that we have in providing the service is that we’re surrounded by experts, and so both experts from actually the whole university. But we mostly rely on the scientists in the College of Ag to help us figure out how best people can manage their soil and their plants. And so you’re correct, if somebody sends a soil sample and they say, I am ready to plant and I wanna make sure that my plant has everything it needs. So primarily plants will get their nutrients from the soil. And so they’ll send a soil sample so we can test it for chemical and physical properties, and we can determine if it’s adequate for whatever they wanna grow.

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. I confess that I am not a green thumb. So these kinds of services sound like something that if I were to really set the goal of getting better would help me a lot if I ever were to turn my attention to getting better, I know where to come. But it’s not only individuals that send you samples, right. So can you talk a little bit about who some of the other organizations or entities are that are sending things to you for your analysis?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: We receive plant water and soil samples from different entities around the country. So we’re involved in several different projects that are research projects that might be looking just in general at soil health that might be looking for how management strategies have changed the soil and maybe improved it. I have a new variety of grape and is it doing well with my current management practices? And so these can be, as you mentioned, large entities, so we’re talking about government agencies, very large national projects.

Jocelyn Hittle: I wonder if you could give an example when you say, if someone is implementing a management plan, what does that mean?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yeah. So for example, a farmer might say, I have a problem with a particular pathogen, let’s say as an example. And so it’s a soil pathogen and this is actually something that is happening now. It’s a research project that I lead, the pathogen is called Spongospora subterranea and it causes a disease called powdery scab. We could have a field for example that we know has a high irrigation rate, because that’s just the practice that has been done in that particular area. And we decide that maybe we’re going to moderate the irrigation. And so this is actually for this particular pathogen water is very important, and so what we would do is we would look at the soil ahead of time. We would make sure that we are planting clean potato seed, and then we would implement that management practice throughout the season. And then at the end, we could collect soil samples to see what is the level of the pathogen in the soil, how did any of the chemical properties change with the management practice? And then we can also collect the potatoes and look at whether a disease happened and if it was reduced in comparison to the field that was irrigated normally.

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Thanks, that’s an excellent example. So just to be sure, I’m understanding what you’re saying. You have a pathogen that’s causing disease in the plant, and what you are studying is, is it in the soil and is there a way for the amount that you water, for example, that particular field to change how much disease is caused by that particular pathogen in the soil, whether it’s a virus or a fungus or a parasite or a bacteria?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: That’s right. That is an example of a way that we can use these services to improve agricultural practices. Yeah.

Jocelyn Hittle: Can you tell us about, what are some of the more unusual things that get sent to you for your lab to analyze?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: I mean, we receive anything from seven foot long tree branches to an inch long piece of bark. We receive boxes of potatoes to test for bacteria. We might receive seeds to test for any microorganisms or insects that might inhibit their export.

Jocelyn Hittle: It sounds a little like your job is a bit like a forensic science show, but the mysteries are being sent to you in the mail. Is that a good analogy?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: I think it is. I actually, when I think about soil testing and plant diagnostics, I do think we’re detectives. And we have to use a lot of our knowledge and resources to figure out what the problem is. And so it starts from, it could be anything to narrowing it down based on information that researchers have generated throughout decades of work. And once you get there, especially when you see something new, it is so exciting. And then the other thing is, scientists we like puzzles because this is not easy. We do have to integrate a lot of knowledge and it can become really, really fun.

Jocelyn Hittle: When these mysteries and puzzles come to you in the mail, let’s say there’s a part of a plant that comes to you in the mail, where do you start to start to solve that puzzle? Like what is the first step?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yeah, that’s a hard question because actually every puzzle is always a challenge. It’s different depending on what the sample is. So I’ll give you two examples. So if it’s a soil sample that’s coming in and let’s say somebody has a problem because their plants are rotting, let’s say. And they think that maybe it’s over-watering, but then they didn’t really over-water or at least not, they don’t consider that they did. Then we need to look at the properties of the soil to figure out if there was something there that might have caused water logging, or that might prevent water from draining properly, or maybe it goes beyond the physical properties of the soil into an excess or a deficiency of something. And so the first thing that we do is think about the environment from which that sample was taken. And we ask the questions to the client, how did you do the sampling? What was planted there? Was anything planted there? What’s around? How do you water? How do you fertilize? After that we really go to the books. And so some of them are already in our brains, but some of it we do need to look through. And so when we gather the information, we say, okay, there is a water logging problem, for example, so what could cause this? And then as I said, the knowledge generated by others helps us figure out what could be the causes of water logging. And then we have to figure out if that’s in fact the case, so we do the testing. And let’s say we find that, let’s say that there had been some clay deposits there, or that there had been some additive that didn’t allow for proper soil drainage. And so we then go back to the client and say, this is what we found and this is what we think is causing it based on the test results, and here is how you can improve your soil.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: In the second example, very similarly, if you have a plant disease issue, what we do is let’s say it’s a spot on a leaf. Well, I would say spots on leaves, then we would look at our literature and say, okay, what can cause spots on, let’s say it’s a tomato, what can cause spots on tomato? And is this possible that it would happen in this environment? And again, we use that environmental data that we gathered to figure that out, and then we’ll go in and in the case of plant disease testing is looking through the microscope or growing any microorganisms that could be causing the problem and figuring out whatever we do find whether or not it can actually produce those symptoms. And then once we’ve confirmed that, then we go back to the client and say, we think that this is causing the problem, it is either common or not common in Colorado or wherever it’s coming from and this is how you can take care of that.

Jocelyn Hittle: So you start with some of the things that you know, you start to narrow it down, you ask a lot of probing questions of the people who know more and slowly get yourself to the answer. That’s great, that’s science in action right there. Ana Cristina, can you tell us a little bit about how your lab will be engaging down here at Spur and what the opportunity is that you all are taking advantage of?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yes, we are very excited to be part of the Spur campus and the programming down there. We have an opportunity to have a larger space to grow as a program. We also are looking forward to being in a more central location in the state being close to I70 and I25, it’s a great place to access our lab. It’s also a hub for learning about agriculture. And as I mentioned before, if you wanna learn about who’s involved in agriculture, the labs are a place to start, and if you’re like me to stay. I think we have an amazing opportunity for people to see what we do for us to share what others in our field are doing by providing a space for them to do so. Our lab is designed with open windows so that people can look inside. And I’m very excited about that, because that means that it’s not gonna be a secret. When we’re doing our detective activities, you can actually see what the detectives are doing and take a peek in there, look at how we deal with samples, what are the types of machines that we work with? How do we communicate in the lab? How do we interpret what we’re seeing? Are we happy? Are we frustrated? Are we excited about something new in there? And so I’m super excited about that.

Jocelyn Hittle: So one of the things that I envision is a group of K-12 kids that are there at the Spur campus that have come on a field trip and they’ve made their way through the educational exhibits on the first floor of the Tara Building, which is where your laboratory will be. And they’ve understood a little bit about cooking food and taste testing new products that are coming out of the food innovation lab, and they’ve made their way upstairs and they are in the hallway outside of your laboratory, which as you mentioned, has all these windows where they can look in and see what you’re doing. And then Ana Cristina steps out, Dr. Fulladolsa comes outside and says, and welcomes them and says a little bit about what you’re doing right then and there and gives them a little glimpse into that moment in time of you and all of your detectives in that laboratory. But it does require something specific from you and from your team to be ready to talk to people and engage with the general public.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: That’s right. And we have a lot of experience in customer service because we do it every single day, multiple times a day. One of the things that will come with our move is that we will have the lab, but we’ll also build an education and engagement program around that. And so, yeah, we’ll need to learn, but I think we have a lot of support to develop a larger education program. And when I say education, I’m referring to higher ed, but also to K through 12 students and their families. And so that is very exciting. I think also when we think about engagement, we have to think about who our audience is. And so we are excited to be, as I said, in a centralized location for farmers across Colorado to be able to access our lab and also to be in an urban location where we can work with Denver and the citizens of Denver and citizens of other cities using Denver as a model, perhaps to start thinking about plant health and soil health in an urban setting. And then I also think that we have an opportunity being within an area that has a larger population of Latinx citizens, and to be able to broaden our reach to a more diverse audience, to be able to include them in the processes that we’re going through by just having an open door and to welcome them to opportunities at CSU, but more than that to opportunities in science, to opportunities in ag, and to opportunities in development of their own interests and careers. When I talk about soil and plant health, we are talking about where food starts. And this is again, one of the things that I’m excited about in integrating our efforts with those of other programs at Spur, because we truly are thinking about food, we’re thinking about our environment and about how people interact with those parts of life that are so elemental.

Jocelyn Hittle: I love the way that you’re talking about soil health and plant health and water quality as the building blocks of how we are feeding ourselves and each other. I also really appreciate your comments about the ability to do outreach to more diverse audiences, to young audiences. We start to see that kids, once they are in the sixth grade or somewhere around sixth grade, they start to see themselves in certain career paths and start to not see themselves in others. And I love the idea that we have real scientists at work, your team they’re doing real science behind those windows and coming out and talking to kids and kids being able to see themselves in your laboratory to envision a future that involves science, if they want it to. Can you talk a little bit about your own experiences being a scientist, and particularly as you building on what you were saying about increasing diversity within stem fields?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yeah, absolutely. I can actually start with my origins. So I’m originally from Guatemala and I grew up in a city and I didn’t really know very much about agriculture except for the stories and that I heard from my grandmother and her family, because she had been living basically in a homestead for a very long time and until she moved and did other things with her life. And so when I decided to go into agriculture, I saw a great opportunity to contribute to humanity and to be able to hopefully make a difference in some way through science and education. And so I studied agricultural systems in Guatemala, and then I met some people that were doing research down there and I got really excited about plant pathology and that’s how I came to study in the United States. I’m saying all of that and at the same time thinking that, I accept that I had a lot of great opportunities in my life to do this. And even my being in this position right now is just a great privilege because we don’t have a lot of representation from perhaps Guatemala itself but also Latin America and people of Latinx origin within the sciences and in agricultural sciences and particular in the United States. And so there are many scientists across the world and there are many scientists in Latin America, but living in Colorado, we see, for example, that the demographics of Colorado don’t quite match the demographics of our fields. And so I think that one of the goals that formed in my mind as I was going through my career was to be able to make this more accessible for others, because it is really important that we have the perspective of a lot of people as we’re trying to come up with solutions for problems that are real present and even emerging within agriculture, within just the natural sciences and in the environment altogether. We’re working for others, we’re working to solve problems to be able to come up with more efficient ways to do things, to improve what we’re doing so that we can have a more sustainable a world and a more sustainable way of living. And we can’t do that alone, we don’t have that power, we have to involve everybody. So I believe that if we talk to people and engage with them, understand what are your questions surrounding what we’re doing and how can we help you understand so that you can contribute, then that’s the best thing we can do as scientists.

Jocelyn Hittle: So everything you just said is one of the reasons that I’m so thrilled that you are a part of what is happening at Spur. Your passion for engaging others in scientific exploration, in ensuring that more diverse young people and well diverse people of all ages are getting engaged in science and bringing their unique perspectives and experiences into the conversation is so important. And a big part of what we hope that the Spur campus can do by kind of putting together the scientists at work and education and outreach in one place and putting together different scientists from different disciplines too, we share the same hope I think and that we can solve problems better, faster, more equitably when more people are at the table and when scientists and all minds are sort of working on these things together. So thank you for all of your passion and inspirational comments. So you have hit on this a little bit already in what you were just describing about your career path. Is there anything that you would like to talk more about how you got where you are, right. Part of Spur is kind of demystifying how you get to be a soil scientist or a water specialist or a chef.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Yeah, honestly, I think it starts with curiosity. I think that’s probably the most important trait of a scientist is curiosity, because you have to ask a lot of questions. And I was always asking questions, when I was a child I asked a million questions and fortunately I had family that was supportive of my question asking, and my mom in particular, she really provided spaces for me to be creative and to express myself and to learn whatever it is that I wanted to learn about all. I confess that my education up to college was somewhat of an exploration for me. I had a lot of fun in school and I really love learning and one of my favorite classes was biology. And so when I started college, I didn’t really have a path defined, but I knew that I wanted to work in biology. I wanted to be able to learn more about our environment and nature and see where I could find a career in that. And so at that point in time I just wanna learn. And then as I went through college, the school that I went to in Guatemala really did a fantastic job of linking the science that we were learning with the impact on society. And it was very important, agriculture is at the heart of many communities in Guatemala. And I learned about how much agriculture impacted those communities and how those communities and their work as farmers impacted everybody else.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: So I got very excited about being an ag. And when I mentioned before that there were some researchers down in Guatemala when I was in college and I started working with them on a research project, and they were working on finding resistance to diseases in tomato and breeding tomatoes with improved traits so that they wouldn’t be affected by this disease. And so I had the opportunity to go to a field one day and I was rating tomatoes for size and color and how well they were growing, et cetera. And then a man came by and he was so excited, I couldn’t exactly hear what he was saying, but I could tell it he was so excited. And as I got closer to him, I could overhear him saying that he was so excited about this particular tomato and that he wanted to grow it in the field over across from where we were at, et cetera. And the person that I was working with who at the time was my undergraduate mentor said, “Do you know why he’s so excited?” And I said, “No, I don’t.” And he said, “Because you couldn’t grow a single tomato here before and you can grow anything.” So there was a bacterium in that field that was absolutely devastating. In experiments we have controls and our negative control was a susceptible tomato, it was susceptible to disease caused by this bacterium. And it was a stick coming out of the ground, there was no plant and that was what that field was entirely. And so when he told me that, I don’t know, I feel like it was a defining moment in my life and in my goals, professional goals to realize that I could truly contribute to a change through research, through agricultural development. And so that’s how I moved on to going to graduate school.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: And then I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I got a degree in plant pathology, and then I moved to Colorado as a Postdoctoral Fellow. And I worked throughout my PhD and my postdoc on potatoes and several different diseases of potato. And then I had the opportunity to start working in the clinic. And when that was presented to me, the Plant Diagnostic Clinic, when that was presented to me, it was very intimidating because you’re going from, I know about potato virus Y and powdery scab and whatever specific pathogen pathol system I was studying, which means, the microorganism and the plants and the environment surrounding that particular problem to I’m gonna have to help people figure out what their problem is in whatever they’re sending me. And I was like, “All right, I’m gonna go for it.” And I did, it was very hard, but I learned a lot. I got a lot of help from others in my department, from the network that I had developed, in grad school and in my post-doc and from the people that were sending the samples. So that was very exciting. And the customer service part of it was hard, but it was incredibly rewarding.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: And so when we were presented with the opportunity to propose our program to grow and move to the Spur campus, it was immediately a yes, because if I was this excited working in the lab that I am now with the resources that we have to be able to expand, to merging with another lab to have one-stop shop kind of a facility for agricultural testing and diagnostic services, and to be able to engage with the public, that’s like the dream. And so that’s how I ended up here. And really it was, I’m not gonna say a lot of luck necessarily, but a lot of open doors that I walked through. And not easy sometimes, you take a lot of risks, but if you don’t take risks you don’t get very far.

Jocelyn Hittle: Thank you so much, Ana Cristina for telling us more about your path and for highlighting that there are two that have to happen for you to move forward, right, a door needs to be opened. The second thing that has to happen is that you have to step through it, and I think that’s such an important message for all of us to remember as we’re thinking about how we want our careers to unfold and what we want our impact to be.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Personally as a professional role with this project, I want to be able to open those doors for people, for people of all backgrounds, for people that have curiosity, for people that want to learn, maybe just to know, and for people that want to make a career out of it.

Jocelyn Hittle: We just have a few minutes left. So I am gonna wrap us up with a couple of questions. One is, if people are interested in finding out more information about your lab, where can they find more information online?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: If they go to the CSU website and they look us up, Plant Diagnostic Clinic or so water plant testing lab, they will find our website there.

Jocelyn Hittle: And on that website, they’ll be able to sign up to get more information or get information about how to send you samples if they’re interested in getting some of their plants or soil or water tested?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: That’s right. So on the website we have the information related to how to submit a sample, how to collect a sample. And we also have our contact information if you would like us to talk about those, that same submitting a sample and collecting the sample to you personally. We also accept in the Plant Diagnostic Clinic images, so we have our email.

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. It’s such an important service and a great way to get the most up-to-date information that is coming out of CSU and other research institutions into the hands of people who can really use it. So it’s a really important role that you play as part of the land grant ethic of connecting knowledge and people, so really appreciate everything that you and your team do. So last question for you, this is our Spur of the Moment questions. So I’m curious, because we’ve been talking about your background a little bit and we’re talking about the sort of the basis of food. Is there a food that you had growing up that you really miss now and you wish you could have more often, like maybe a favorite from your family?

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: No. Sometimes it takes you to leave somewhere to truly appreciate what you had. The most important foods for the Guatemalan people are corn and beans, and I really miss eating beans and tortillas. So I make them but they’re just not the same.

Jocelyn Hittle: Not the same. They never are quite the same as what we had growing up somehow and especially when you’re in a different place.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: That’s right. Yeah.

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And I hope you have a chance to have some really good tortillas and beans sometime soon. And I really appreciate everything that you said, the passion that you infuse into everything that you do with your work and I know that this vision that I described before of you walking out of your lab and talking to those groups of K-12 kids is just around the corner. And I hope that it is as fulfilling as your work right now and I know you have so much passion for it, so I think it will be. Once again, my guest today was Ana Cristina Fulladolsa, who is the Manager of the Soil and Plant Health Diagnostic Laboratory. And thank you so much again for joining us today.

Ana Cristina Fulladolsa: Thank you Jocelyn, for having me here. It was great to talk to you and share what’s coming up.

Jocelyn Hittle: The Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Peach Islander Productions and our theme music is by Ketsa. If you have a mystery you would like Ana Cristina’s team of detectives to solve, you can find information about how to send a soil butter or plant sample to her laboratory in the show notes. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode of Spur of the Moment. Until then, be well.