How allergens in pollen help plants do more than make you sneeze
Clouds of the grains may be easy to hate, but they’re crucial for plant health
By Susan Milius
“Are plants trying to kill us?” allergy sufferers often ask Deborah Devis.
A plant molecular geneticist at the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus in Australia, Devis should know the answer better than most. She is chugging through the last few months of a Ph.D. that involves predicting how grasses use pollen proteins that make people sneeze, wheeze and weep for days on end.
What’s known so far about what allergens do for pollens shed by grasses, trees and even mosses has nothing to do with revenge against a primate likely to attack them with mowers and other sharp tools, she says. Instead, plants are just trying to live like the rest of us.