Brassica napus, also more commonly known as rapeseed, canola or le colza in French, is an important plant grown worldwide from Canada to northern Europe all the way to China. The name canola came from shortening “Canada oil low acid,” a reference to the genetic selection performed to allow the plant to grow better in the Canadian climate by reducing its levels of erucic acid. The plant is used to produce vegetable oil, biodiesel and livestock feed.
At the Institut-Agro Rennes-Angers, Riley, a PhD student in Agricultural Engineering at North Carolina State University, is studying the different root structures formed by the canola plant as well as the soil contents near the plant (known as the rhizosphere) and far from the plant (also known as bulk soil) to understand how the plant adapts to its environment. She spends her time analyzing and creating drawings of the roots of canola plants, analyzing soil samples in the lab and writing data analysis code in R (R is a programming language commonly used in academia for statistical analysis).
