{"id":1075,"date":"2012-04-06T16:05:10","date_gmt":"2012-04-06T20:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anthony.darrouzet-nardi.net\/scienceblog\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2012-04-06T16:05:10","modified_gmt":"2012-04-06T20:05:10","slug":"plant-stress-master-variable-non-structural-carbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/?p=1075","title":{"rendered":"Plant stress master variable: non-structural carbon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our lab group recently read a 2010 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0378112710004743\">review paper<\/a> by \u00dclo Niinemets that\u00a0presents the interesting hypothesis that the effects of various stresses on tree behavior can be summarized using the master variable of &#8220;nonstructural&#8221; or &#8220;storage&#8221; carbon. The idea is that if the plant is doing well, it will store extra carbon to use in case of stress such as waterlogging, heat wave, water stress, or anything else that prevents it from photosynthesizing. When stresses arrive, the trees start using up that carbon. When the storage carbon is gone, they are at risk of death if the stress does not end:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Currently the effects of various stresses cannot be deconvoluted in field environments, but storage carbon size likely provides\u00a0an important point of convergence of various stress pathways.\u00a0The predictions based on non-structural carbon pools suggest that\u00a0maintenance of higher storage carbon pools increases the tolerance of sustained stress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Could understanding plant stress be as simple as this? Probably not, but it&#8217;s a nice place to start.\u00a0We are thinking about doing some preliminary analyses with some of our arctic plants. Our idea is to take plant tissues, enzymatically degrade the starches into sugar and then measure the total sugar pool. We think that our snowmelt acceleration treatment may be stressing the plants. If we do see reductions in nonstructural carbon in those plants, it would be consistent with our hypothesis of plant stress and could provide a nice piece of evidence. The review also mentions that in the future, we may find more sophisticated correlates like VOCs to help us nondestructively assess plant stress level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our lab group recently read a 2010 review paper by \u00dclo Niinemets that\u00a0presents the interesting hypothesis that the effects of various stresses on tree behavior can be summarized using the master variable of &#8220;nonstructural&#8221; or &#8220;storage&#8221; carbon. The idea is that if the plant is doing well, it will store extra carbon to use in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1119,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions\/1119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}