Eric Nyquist
What’s going on in heat-stressed plants?
The plumbing inside plants carries water from the tip of the roots to the crown of a tree. But scientists are still devising ways to measure the water pressure in plant cells accurately, a crucial feature in understanding how plants react to drought. Craig Brodersen, a professor at the School of the Environment, discovered that he could use a laser to produce bubbles within plant tissues—and, crucially, that how quickly the bubbles disappear conveyed something fundamental. “We realized that we could use those bubbles to measure the pressure of the inside of these cells,” he says. With a YPS seed grant, he and his colleagues have bought a high-speed camera to help develop this approach to measuring drought stress. “We’ve gotten it to work in probably 50 different species now,” he says.
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