Environmental response and adaptation

Current: Patricia Lang, Joel Erberich, Macy Vollbrecht

Collaborators: Joe Berry, Moi Exposito-Alonso

Alumni: Ido Nir, Anne Vatén, Graham Dow, On Sun Lau

Stomata both regulate and are regulated by global carbon and water cycles. We are identifying the genetic circuitry by which plants perceive environmental cues and respond by creating the appropriate number and patterns of stomata to thrive in changing and challenging climates. Return to Main Research

Global-scale impacts on agriculture and the climate are linked to the collective activities of billions of stomata on thousands of plant species. A collaboration with ecophysiologist Joe Berry (Carnegie) and Graham Dow (now NIAB, UK) allowed us to use tools derived from our molecular-scale studies to improve organismal-scale models for photosynthetic activity and to provide experimental evidence that evolutionarily conserved stomatal patterns are essential for efficient photosynthesis. We found that the integrated developmental responses leaves exhibit in response to different environmental conditions could be dissected into genetic subroutines and we are currently investigating details of those subroutines. Here we also use Brachypodium, tomato and Arabidopsis accessions from different climates to explore the range of developmental responses to altered climate variables and dissect their shared and unique genetic circuitry for environmental response.

A project lead by postdoc Patti Lang takes advantage of new “ancient DNA” techniques to sample genetic data and stomatal phenotypes from herbarium samples collected over the last 250 years. With collaborators in the population genetics field, we are also generating tools to be able to infer how cellular phenotypes have responded to climate change through adaptive evolution.

Integrative mechanisms for balancing carbon acquisition, water preservation and cooling needs selected naturally in past climates may be sub-optimal for plant performance in future climates. The potential to identify these mechanisms and then genetically uncouple some of the responses, could enable us to engineer new set-points for resource-use efficiency.

Some recent papers on this theme:

Century-long timelines of herbarium genomes predict plant stomatal response to climate change (2022) Patricia Lang, lead author [link to PDF]

Direct Control of SPEECHLESS by PIF4 in the High-Temperature Response of Stomatal Development (2018) On Sun Lau, lead author [link to PDF]

An integrated model of stomatal development and leaf physiology (2014) Graham Dow, lead author [link to PDF]