Tag: Climate Change

Plants, like animals, have a natural immune system that helps them defend against diseases. They not only fight local pathogens but can also alert distant, non-infected tissues to prepare for infection, a process called systemic acquired resistance (SAR). All these mechanisms can be threatened by climate…

Agriculture contributes substantially to climate change. Many agricultural interventions have been suggested as opportunities to lower this impact, through CO2 sequestration or through reducing emissions of CO2 and CH4. This review by Vickers and Zerbe lays out how to use Fermi calculations to identify…

Precipitation plays an important role in shaping leaf tissue composition, and as climate change progresses, we’ll likely see dramatic shifts in precipitation regimes. Changes in leaf tissue composition due to increased rainfall or drought may have cascading effects on soil microbe communities and ultimately…

The June 12 issue of Science has a focus on plants and heat that includes several excellent review and research articles. In a very interesting review, Singh Yadav et al. discuss the complex and fascinating question of how plants sense temperature, emphasizing both the biophysical nature of temperature…

They May 29 issue of Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B. similarly addresses the pressing questions of how crop plants will continue to feed the world in spite of the rapidly changing climate. This issue covers some of the same topics as the Science special issue on heat stress but goes beyond heat to cover drought…

Anthropogenic climate change has introduced tremendous uncertainty about the future of all life on Earth. As primary producers, threats to plants are transduced up the food chain to their consumers, including people, which is why there is a great need to develop resilient plants that are able to sustain…

The global forest carbon sink is vital for mitigating climate change by absorbing CO2 and offsetting nearly half of fossil-fuel emissions. Over the past three decades, this sink has remained stable with minor fluctuations, but its future is threatened by deforestation, forest ageing, and climate…

Optimal temperatures for growth and development vary between plant species, making accurate temperature sensing crucial for their fitness. The search for molecular mechanisms underlying temperature signaling suggests that a single temperature sensor likely does not exist in plants. Instead, plants possess…