Plant Science Stories
How can we crack the biofuel roadblock?
Stanford, CA— Along with photosynthesis, the plant cell wall is one of the features that most set plants apart from animals. A structural molecule called cellulose is necessary for the manufacture of...
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Steroids control gas exchange in plants
Stanford, CA— Plant's leaves are sealed with a gas-tight wax layer to prevent water loss. Plants breathe through microscopic pores called stomata (Greek for mouths) on the surfaces of leaves. Over 40...
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New tool offers unprecedented access for root studies
Stanford, CA— Plant roots are fascinating plant organs – they not only anchor the plant, but are also the world’s most efficient mining companies. Roots live in darkness and direct the activities of...
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How can plant research help us understand diabetes?
  Stanford, CA – Scientists at Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology have made the first real-time observations of sugars in the cells of intact and living plant tissues. With the...
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Digital genome
Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga ...
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Meet Carnegie Scientists
Moises Exposito-Alonso
Evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso joined the Department of Plant Biology as a staff associate in September 2019. He investigates whether and how plants will evolve to keep pace with climate change by conducting large-scale ecological and genome sequencing experiments. He also...
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Arthur Grossman
Arthur Grossman believes that the future of plant science depends on research that spans ecology, physiology, molecular biology and genomics. As such, work in his lab has been extremely diverse. He identifies new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching...
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David Ehrhardt
Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement  within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore...
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Lighting up the plant hormone “command system”
Stanford, CA —Light is not only the source of a plant’s energy, but also an environmental signal that instructs the growth behavior of plants. As a result, a plant’s sensitivity to light is of great...
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Amoeba may offer key clue to photosynthetic evolution
Stanford, CA—The major difference between plant and animal cells is the photosynthetic process, which converts light energy into chemical energy. When light isn’t available, energy is generated by...
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Zhiyong Wang Receives Germany’s Humboldt Research Award
Washington, DC— Carnegie’s Zhiyong Wang will receive the Humboldt Research Award, one of Germany’s most-prestigious prizes. Granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation up to 100 times each year...
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Toxic "red tide" algal bloom. Image purchased from Shutterstock.
Unraveling a mystery of dinoflagellate genomic architecture
May 3, 2021

Palo Alto, CA—New work from a Stanford University-led team of researchers including Carnegie’s Arthur Grossman and Tingting Xiang unravels a longstanding mystery about the relationship between form and function in the genetic material of a diverse group of algae called dinoflagellates.

Their findings, published in Nature Genetics, have implications for understanding genomic organizational principles of all organisms.

Dinoflagellates include more than 2,000 species of marine and freshwater plankton, many of which are photosynthetic, and some of which also ingest other organisms for food. They play a wide variety of roles in various ecosystems, including extreme

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Photo of flowering Arabidopsis thaliana purchased from Shutterstock.
A plant’s nutrient-sensing abilities can modulate its response to environmental stress
February 11, 2021

Palo Alto, CA— Understanding how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions is crucial to developing effective strategies for protecting important agricultural crops from a changing climate. New research led by Carnegie’s Zhiyong Wang, Shouling Xu, and Yang Bi reveals an important process by which plants switch between amplified and dampened stress responses. Their work is published by Nature Communications.

To survive in a changing environment, plants must choose between different response strategies, which are based on both external environmental factors and internal nutritional and energy demands. For example, a plant might either delay or accelerate its

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Figure from Energy and Environmental Science paper
Engineering light availability for crop production—a solution for coming challenges?
February 1, 2021

Palo Alto, CA— What if we could increase a plant’s productivity by modifying the light to which it is exposed? This could increase the yield of important food and biofuel crops and also combat climate change by sequestering atmospheric carbon.

In a recent perspective piece in Energy and Environmental Science, Carnegie’s Arthur Grossman and Petra Redekop joined colleagues from Stanford University—Larissa Kunz, Matteo Cargnello, and Arun Majumdar—and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign’s Donald Ort to argue that specially engineered lighting modifications through the use of photoluminescent material could drive a next big leap in the green

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Senna tora photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Can we harness a plant’s ability to synthesize medicinal compounds?
November 24, 2020

Palo Alto, CA— Anthraquinones are a class of naturally occurring compounds prized for their medicinal properties, as well as for other applications, including ecologically friendly dyes. Despite wide interest, the mechanism by which plants produce them has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

New work from an international team of scientists including Carnegie’s Sue Rhee reveals a gene responsible for anthraquinone synthesis in plants.  Their findings could help scientists cultivate a plant-based mechanism for harvesting these useful compounds in bulk quantities.

“Senna tora is a legume with anthraquinone-based medicinal properties that have long

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Digital genome

Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Now that many genomes from algae to mosses and trees are publicly available, this information can be mined using bioinformatics to build models to understand gene function and ultimately for designing plants for a wide spectrum of applications.

 Carnegie researchers have pioneered a genome-wide gene association network Aranet that can assign functions

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Moises Exposito-Alonso

Evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso joined the Department of Plant Biology as a staff associate in September 2019. He investigates whether and how plants will evolve to keep pace with climate change by conducting large-scale ecological and genome sequencing experiments. He also develops computational methods to derive fundamental principles of evolution, such as how fast natural populations acquire new mutations and how past climates shaped continental-scale biodiversity patterns. His goal is to use these first principles and computational approaches to forecast evolutionary outcomes of populations under climate change to anticipate potential future

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Devaki Bhaya

Devaki Bhaya wants to understand how environmental stressors, such as light, nutrients, and viral attacks are sensed by and affect photosynthetic microorganisms. She is also interested in understanding the mechanisms behind microorganism movements, and how individuals in groups communicate, evolve, share resources. To these ends, she focuses on one-celled, aquatic cyanobacteria, in the lab with model organisms and with organisms in naturally occurring communities.

 Phototaxis is the ability of organisms to move directionally in response to a light source.  Many cyanobacteria exhibit phototaxis, both towards and away from light. The ability to move into optimal light

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Matthew Evans

Matthew Evans wants to provide new tools for plant scientists to engineer better seeds for human needs. He focuses on one of the two phases to their life cycle. In the first phase, the sporophyte is the diploid generation—that is with two similar sets of chromosomes--that undergoes meiosis to produce cells called spores. Each spore divides forming a single set of chromosomes (haploid) --the gametophyte--which produces the sperm and egg cells.

Evans studies how the haploid genome is required for normal egg and sperm function. In flowering plants, the female gametophyte, called the embryo sac, consists of four cell types: the egg cell, the central cell, and two types of

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Arthur Grossman

Arthur Grossman believes that the future of plant science depends on research that spans ecology, physiology, molecular biology and genomics. As such, work in his lab has been extremely diverse. He identifies new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching and the impact of temperature and light on the bleaching process.

He also has extensively studied the blue-green algae Chlamydomonas genome and is establishing methods for examining the set of RNA molecules and the function of proteins involved in their photosynthesis and acclimation. He also studies the regulation of sulfur metabolism in green algae and plants.  

Grossman

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