Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

what is the name for plant disease that is caused by excess amount of iron?

Hi!

A plant disease that is caused by an excess amount of iron is leaf burn.

I hope this helps!

thank you very much it helped me alot.
My topic is something like...
"does greentea effects the plant that has leafburn?"
since greentea is natural iron chelator, my hypothesis is that it will effect leafburn in some ways.
Do you have any suggestions or advice for me???

Thank you^^

Hi Christina,

That sounds like an interesting project. It may have some challenges that you need to think about.

First of all what type of plant will you use? Is there a plant that you know gets leaf burn when the environmental iron is too high. Does the plant grow fast so that you know it will respond in the time you have to do the experiment? and in small enough containers to have several of them?

You might need several weeks to do the experiment because you will need to give the plants an overdose of iron and make sure they have leaf burn before you try to "rescue" them with the green tea treatment.

You may need to have quite a few plants so that you can even out the variability in response between the plants. Even if they are all the same kind of plant some of them may get the leaf burn worse than others treated the same way. And then some of them may respond better to the green tea than others.

You also need to think about what control you would use. To make sure that the sick plants don't just get better on their own. Do you think no treatment or regular water would be more appropriate?

How will you measure the leaf burn - is there some way you can measure the total amount of leaf surface that is damaged by the leaf burn?

Post back with your ideas so people can help you think through your plans.

Best of luck,
Caroline