Stomata and the environment
Stomata serve as the main conduits for gas exchange between plants and the atmosphere; they are critical for photosynthesis and exert a major influence on global carbon and water cycles. For a plant, an optimal balance of CO2 uptake and water vapor release depends on the number, position and behavior of stomatal complexes.  The properties of stomatal production and distribution are fine-tuned by signals operating across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. For example, many (but not all) plants decrease their stomatal production in response to elevated [CO2].

How do plants sense the environment, and how do they alter their stomatal development in response? While identifying the components of the climate sensing apparatus is an extremely difficult problem, many of the genes we already study are very likely to be part of the response.  Understanding how these genes are regulated by local and long-range cues is a goal of this work.

In collaboration with Joe Berry, an ecophysiologist at the Carnegie Institution, Department of Global Ecology, we are also developing novel integrated approaches to measure the consequences of altered stomatal production from the molecular to the small plot scale. These experiments address major theoretical and practical questions about the effects of climate change on plants: how are processes at the leaf and individual level scalable to the community, landscape and global level?  How well do global models predict behavior of individual plants? What is the potential for mitigating the detrimental effects of climate change by altering stomatal characteristics?

Relevant lab publications

Bergmann D (2006) Stomatal development: from neighborly to global communication. Curr Opin Plant Biol. 2006 Oct;9(5):478-83. PMID: 16890476

Funding by Stanford BIO-X