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Lose less water without affecting carbon fixation in plants? Recent study offers a novel approach

2019-04-17

Stomata are pores in the leaf epidermis that play a crucial role in plants. They allow CO2 uptake for photosynthetic carbon assimilation at the expense of water loss via transpiration. Efforts to improve plant water use efficiency (WUE) have focused on reducing stomatal density, despite its implicit penalty in carbon assimilation. Approaches to reducing transpiration without incurring a cost for photosynthesis must circumvent this inherent coupling of carbon dioxide and water vapor diffusion.

Michael Blatt, Qiushi Chair Professor of ZJU and a professor of plant physiology and biophysics at the University of Glasgow, teamed up with Prof. John Christie from the University of Glasgow and Researcher WANG Yizhou from Zhejiang University Institute of Crop Science to engage in research into a potential way to improve carbon assimilation, water use and growth. Their findings are published in an article entitled “Optogenetic manipulation of stomatal kinetics improves carbon assimilation, water use, and growth” in the March 29 issue of Science.

In the study, they used the synthetic, blue light–induced K+ channel1 (BLINK1) as a tool for modulating guard cell K+ conductance and accelerating changes in stomatal aperture with light.BLINK1 introduced a K+ conductance and accelerated both stomatal opening under light exposure and closing after irradiationin Arabidopsis. Integrated over the growth period, BLINK1 drove a 2.2-fold increase in biomass in fluctuating light without cost in water use by the plant. Thus, this study presented the potential of enhancing stomatal kinetics to improve water use efficiency without penalty in carbon fixation, thus providing vital theoretical and technological support for genetic breeding.