- Ideally, when you go into a research project, you wanna have as little bias as possible. So you go in with an open mind, and you let the data tell you what the most interesting hypotheses are, what the most interesting outcomes are. 

In real life, that doesn't happen, right? We often get more excited about particular hypotheses, or answers to our questions than others. And in my case, I was quite excited about the possibility that water availability could be the key factor leading to group patterning. And again, that kinda goes back to sort of what my background was. Coming from the Arizona desert, knowing full well how important water availability is to the growth and development of plants. But also, there were kinda conditions on the ground. So I had just moved from Arizona to California in order to start my PhD project, and right about that time, we were getting into the throes of this really bad California drought. And there were all these billboards all around the highways saying, you now, "Food Grows Where Water Flows." So it was very clear that the issue of water was very relevant at that time in society. 

It's also important to realize that the environment that you're in as a researcher, including your PI, your lab mates, your colleagues, others in the field that you interact with, can also kind of bring in their own biases that will affect how you move forward with your research project. 

So in my particular case, looking at this root branching phenotype, the term that we were using at the time in the lab was hydro-patterning, which, built into the name, really strongly illustrates how invested we were that water was, most likely, what was affecting this process. And when I was developing my research plan to study this process more thoroughly for my PhD project, a lot of the experiments I was thinking of doing about looking at what exactly is the environmental signal. In some ways, I kind of viewed them as kind of formalities. Like, we had already had a pretty strong hunch that water was probably the most important signal, and we were doing, we were testing these other hypothesis kind of just to rule them out. 

And it was only when I went up for my qualifying exam, where you have to write up your research proposal and present it to a committee of three professors, they were quite critical of how I was framing the project. And using the term hydro-patterning was very strongly scrutinized, viewing these experiments as kind of formalities was strongly scrutinized. So, bringing in critical minds that were, kind of, from the outside looking in, really helped to kind of dispel some of the bias that we had in looking as this process. 

Although I came into the project with a particular bias, that I was quite interested in water availability as the key signal, there were other hypotheses that were equally interesting, equally important to test. And again, my question was, what environmental signal was leading to patterning of root branches? And, a pretty generic hypothesis to answer that question is, environmental signal X is patterning root branches. And you can replace X with whatever environmental signal you think is important. And, each signal that I named was its own independent hypothesis. 

As it turned out, in the results to the experiment, the data did point to water availability being the key signal. Initially I was pretty happy, but then, I pretty immediately caught myself, and told myself, is this really conclusive? Is this enough to really stop the line of inquiry and say, "We have an answer. "It's water availability." And the answer is no, because I had only done it one time, right, and there were other hypotheses that I needed to test in order to rule out, or even see if they also have an effect. Because, just because water has an effect on root development, doesn't necessarily mean that these other environmental signals have no effect. So I still had a lot of work to do, even after getting this one, initially, quite exciting result.