In Illinois, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a groundbreaking new tool that allows them to watch and quantify how plants breathe through stomata in real-time and under strictly controlled environmental conditions. The study, published in the journal Plant Physiology, introduces a system dubbed “Stomata In-Sight.” It solves a long-standing technical challenge in plant biology: how to observe the microscopic movements of stomatal pores while simultaneously measuring how much gas they are exchanging with the atmosphere.
The “Mouths” of the Plant, stomata (Greek for “mouths”), are critical to global agriculture. When they open, plants get the carbon they need to grow, but they also lose water. Therefore, understanding how the number and operation of these pores determine the efficiency of photosynthetic gas exchange is key to developing crops that need less water to grow and can reliably produce food, biofuel and bioproducts in times and places of drought stress.
