If fall allergies are getting you down, take heart: More of the world is suffering with you.
Johns Hopkins students are researching one of the fall?s most painful allergens, ragweed, to try to see how pollen ? and the plant itself ? is spreading even to other continents.
“One major concern about how ragweed grows is how it has adapted to different environments,” said Mike Martin, 23, an environmental engineering student at Johns Hopkins University.
His findings, gathered with classmate Marcelo Chamecki, could lead to better ways to track the pollen?s travel as well as control the pesky plant?s spread, Martin said. He hopes his discoveries could aid the 15 million people with ragweed allergies in the United States and Canada alone.
Ragweed is primarily a North American plant, but it?s spreading across Europe, Japan and Australia, Martin said.
They spent months in an 18-acre field of ragweed near the District of Columbia, taking measurements of pollen and wind movements and filming extreme close-ups of pollen taking flight.
“I?m not allergic,” Martin said. “I imagine if I was, it might have killed me. It was in my hair, it stained my shoes.”
Martin and Chamecki captured detailed models of wind and pollen movement throughout the field with a variety of high- and low-tech sensors from one to six meters off the ground. Their results created a three-dimensional real-time image of pollen dispersal.
Armedwith that information, they hope to provide advanced models to predict how ragweed pollen gets into the atmosphere and, ultimately, whether that cycle can be disrupted.
“My main interest is learning how the wind spreads the pollen under different turbulence and temperature conditions,” said Chamecki, who is from Curitiba, Brazil.
The model also could someday help to predict the spread of bioengineered corn pollen before it contaminates natural crops.
Fast facts
» One small plant is capable of releasing 1 billion grains of pollen per season.
» Johns Hopkins University?s close-up camera captured images of pollen being released in clumps of about 500 grains each.
» Researchers later were able to document the way those clumps begin to fall apart and disperse as they move through the air.
Source: Johns Hopkins University
