Plant 'breathing' mechanism discovered
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - 07:07
in Biology & Nature
A tiny, little-understood plant pore has enormous implications for weather forecasting, climate change, agriculture, hydrology, and more. A study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the Research Centre Juelich in Germany, has now overturned the conventional belief about how these important structures called stomata regulate water vapour loss from the leaf - a process called transpiration. They found that radiation is the driving force of physical processes deep within the leaf. The research is published the week of July 12, 2010, in the on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...