Charles Anderson
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Plants breathe through stomata, microscopic pores on their leaves that open to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and close to save water. How fast these pores respond to changing light or dryness affects how much food a crop makes and how much water it loses.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Biology
Biophysics
- Topics
stomata
guard cells
subsidiary cells
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test the "see-saw" hypothesis that grass guard cells swell while neighboring subsidiary cells deflate to open and close stomatal pores rapidly, using the model grass Brachypodium distachyon.
- Genetically engineer the cell-wall composition of guard and subsidiary cells in Brachypodium and measure how these changes alter stomatal opening, closing and overall function.
- Measure and computationally model the mechanical properties of normal and modified stomatal complexes, using computer vision pipelines to quantify changes in cell volume and shape.
- Build experimentally testable models of grass stomatal mechanics that predict cell designs which could improve water use efficiency and carbon uptake in crops.
More about the research
Grasses, the family that includes maize and wheat, have unusually fast stomata, but how they are built to move so quickly is not well understood.
Why it matters
Faster, better-tuned stomata could help crops such as maize and wheat capture more carbon dioxide while using water more efficiently. Models from this work may point to cell-wall changes that improve crop yield, water use efficiency and carbon drawdown from the air, which could support food security and the production of fibers and wood in a changing climate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Craig Brodersen
Yale University, CT·Plant Science & Agriculture
Measure guard cell and epidermal cell turgor pressure directly in living leaves, using a laser-induced gas bubble whose collapse rate reveals the pressure inside the cell.
Daniel Robertson
University of Idaho, ID·Plant Science & Agriculture
Automate high-throughput phenotyping of cereal stalks, meaning fast trait measurements across many plants, to overcome the shortage of measured plants compared with millions of genetic markers.
Marisa Otegui
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Plant Science & Agriculture
Analyze how autophagy, the cell's self-digestion recycling system, affects recycling in different photosynthetic maize leaf cell types, using pooled cell-type proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.