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The paper
M. Papanatsiou et al., “Optogenetic manipulation of stomatal kinetics improves carbon assimilation, water use, and growth,” Science, 363:1456–59, 2019.
In plants, guard cells control the stomatal opening by expanding and contracting through ion flux. When a plant senses light, a signal is sent to the guard cell to increase its ion content, which causes the cell to take in water and swell in size. In this state, the stoma is open so that it can start taking in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. When there’s no light available for photosynthesis, the plant closes its stomata so it doesn’t lose water through evaporation. Biologists suspected that the speed at which the guard cells react to changing conditions affects plants’ productivity and water use efficiency.
To test this idea, a team of researchers borrowed a tool from neurobiology: optogenetics, which enables scientists to use light to control membrane ...
