(Press-News.org) New University of Arizona research indicates that leaf vein patterns correlate with functions such as carbon intake and water use – knowledge that could help scientists better understand the complex carbon cycle that is at the heart of global climate warming.
"Leaves have very different networks of veins. They have different shapes, different sizes, different thicknesses," said Benjamin Blonder, a doctoral student in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. "The really interesting question is how a leaf with a certain form produces a certain function."
Blonder developed a mathematical model to predict the functions of leaves based on three properties of the vein network: density, distance between veins and number of loops, or enclosed regions of smaller veins much like capillaries in humans.
Vein density reflects how much energy and resources the leaf has invested in the network, while distance between veins shows how well the veins are supplying resources to the leaf. The number of loops is a measure of the leaf's resilience and plays a role in determining its lifespan. If the veins reconnect often and part of the leaf becomes damaged, resources can be circulated through different pathways.
"It's like in a city where there's a roadblock somewhere," said Blonder. "If the city was designed well, you can still take another road to get to where you want to be."
Blonder won the UA Graduate and Professional Student Showcase President's Award for his work, which was published this week online in the journal Ecology Letters.
The vein network inside of a leaf is like most of the important organ systems in a person, Blonder said.
"It's like the skeleton because it holds the whole leaf up and lets it capture sunlight and not get blown over in a windstorm. It's like the circulatory system because it's distributing water from the roots up to all the cells within the leaf, and it's also bringing resources from the leaf back to the rest of the plant after photosynthesis has happened. It's also like a nervous system because there are chemical signals that are transmitted to the leaves from other parts of the plant through the liquid in the veins," he said.
"This is important for the function of the leaf because when this one structure is implicated in so many different patterns, clearly there're going to be tradeoffs between being able to do all of these different functions well," said Blonder. For example, a leaf with a very loopy network of veins might live longer, but it will also cost a lot of carbon, which plants absorb from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to develop that vein network.
Blonder's model successfully predicted relationships among photosynthetic rate, lifespan, carbon cost and nitrogen cost for more than 2,500 species worldwide based on global data. But that doesn't mean it will work on a local scale.
To find out, the team tested leaves from 25 plant species on the UA campus. While initial results appear to show that the model will work, the team hasn't tested enough samples to know if it successfully predicts relationships in leaf function on a case-specific basis. More extensive studies will include leaves from species at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado.
"If it's successful, we hopefully have a really satisfying way of understanding why leaves look different in different environments – also a useful way of understanding how leaves are functioning in different environments that can be used for climate modeling or for reconstructing past climates from fossils of leaves," said Blonder.
So how do relationships among plant leaf functions impact global carbon levels?
"Carbon can only get into leaves through little pores on the leaf surface, and when carbon comes in, which is something good for the plant, water also comes out," said Blonder. "There's this incredibly tricky tradeoff for all plants where they need to gain carbon to make energy, but to gain that carbon they lose a lot of water in the process. So if you want to gain more carbon, you have to lose more water."
Plants with denser vein networks – veins that are closer together – are able to withstand higher levels of water loss and absorb more carbon. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean you should plant trees with dense leaf vein networks if you want to save the planet.
"It becomes a little bit more difficult to scale up beyond there because a plant is not only just its leaves: It's also the trunk and the roots and so on," said Blonder. "The important thing to think about is that other parts of the plant are going to be contributing to the carbon cycle also in terms of decomposition or other large-scale environmental effects."
"Carbon flux from plants is critical to understanding global change and the global carbon cycle," said Blonder. "What we're hoping to be able to do is understand the leaf side of the picture, but there's clearly a lot more to plants and the environment than that. So this is not the answer to every environmental question but it's a good start because leaves are the site of photosynthesis and carbon flux, and it's certainly necessary to understand those before you can understand plants in general."
Blonder hopes to use his model to develop more comprehensive climate models that take plants into account and to better understand past climates. Blonder's model could play an important role in understanding plant ecology, global carbon cycling and other environmental processes in the future.
INFORMATION:
Blonder is a Biosphere 2 2010-11 Science and Society Fellow and keeps a blog about his research (http://bblonder.wordpress.com/). Undergraduate students Lindsey Parker, Jackie Bezinson and David Cahler assisted Blonder with his research.
A slide show of leaf vein patterns and the science behind them is at http://uanews.org/node/35575
The lifeblood of leaves: Vein networks control plant patterns
University of Arizona graduate student Benjamin Blonder may have solved the mystery of how leaf vein patterns correlate with use of sunlight, carbon and other nutrients
2010-11-18
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Orangutans count on stats for survival
2010-11-18
Orangutans threatened with extinction could be brought back from the brink with help from a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) statistician.
Professor Kerrie Mengersen, from the School of Mathematical Sciences, is part of a study to guide efforts for saving the Indonesian primate whose name means "person of the forest".
Professor Mengersen said the study had found a quarter of villagers who lived side-by-side with orangutans did not know it was illegal under Indonesian law to kill the primates, and five per cent admitted to killing 1000 orangutans last year.
Professor ...
New needle-free HPV vaccine increases effectiveness, availability in developing world
2010-11-18
Arlington, Va. — New research being presented at the 2010 FIP Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress in association with the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists Annual Meeting and Exposition will highlight a targeted inhalable dry powder vaccine that may prove preferable in terms of needle avoidance and expected lower cost than the current commercial human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine used throughout the world.
HPV is the number one cause of cervical cancer, which is the second most common cancer in women around the globe. According to the World Health ...
Post-traumatic stress disorder linked to death, atherosclerosis in veterans
2010-11-18
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more than doubles a veteran's risk of death from any cause and is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2010.
PTSD is more than a psychological disorder, and the study suggests that physicians should provide early and aggressive evaluation and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors in patients with PTSD, said Naser Ahmadi, M.D., M.S., and Ramin Ebrahimi, M.D., co-principal investigators of the study. PTSD is a cluster of symptoms ...
Wednesday news tips: Nov. 17, 2010
2010-11-18
9 a.m. Abstract 20649 – Some ICD recipients may not get optimal medical therapy
Guidelines recommending optimal medical therapy are not always followed for patients receiving implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), a new study found.
Researchers examined optimal medical therapy — beta blocker and angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI)/angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB) at discharge — among ICD patients with ejection fractions below 35 percent. Of the 231,725 patient stays analyzed, 73.1 percent of the patients received optimal medical therapy at ...
Aged, damaged hearts yield stem cells that could treat heart failure
2010-11-18
Cardiac stem cells — even in elderly and sick patients — could generate new heart muscle and vessel tissue and be used to treat heart failure, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2010.
Scientists surgically removed tissue from the muscular wall of the heart's chambers in 21 patients. They then isolated and multiplied the cardiac stem cells (CSCs) found there. Most of the patients had ischemic cardiomyopathy (enlarged and weakened muscle due to coronary artery disease). Eleven also had diabetes. The average age of patients ...
Georgetown neuroscientists -- in their own words
2010-11-18
San Diego -- Researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center's departments of neuroscience, pharmacology, physiology, biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology, and the interdisciplinary program of neuroscience will present more than 50 research abstracts at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience Nov. 13th through the 17th in San Diego.
Modulation of temporal relationships between default mode and task-positive networks by the dopamine transporter genotype during working memory and the resting state
Session: Imaging Human Memory Function
Abstract/Poster: ...
UWM research offers hope for treatment of cocaine addiction
2010-11-18
Two separate discoveries by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) offer potential for development of a first-ever pharmacological treatment for cocaine addiction.
In one study, a common beta blocker, propranolol, currently used to treat hypertension and anxiety, has shown to be effective in preventing the brain from retrieving memories associated with cocaine use in animal-addiction models, according to Devin Mueller, UWM assistant professor of psychology and a co-author with James Otis of the research.
The work was presented today at the annual ...
Light at night causes changes in brain linked to depression
2010-11-18
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Exposure to even dim light at night is enough to cause physical changes in the brains of hamsters that may be associated with depression, a new study shows.
Researchers found that female Siberian hamsters exposed to dim light every night for eight weeks showed significant changes in a part of the brain called the hippocampus.
This is the first time researchers have found that light at night, by itself, may be linked to changes in the hippocampus.
These alterations may be a key reason why the researchers also found that the hamsters exposed to dim ...
Cholesterol-lowering statins boost bacteria-killing cells
2010-11-18
Widely prescribed for their cholesterol-lowering properties, recent clinical research indicates that statins can produce a second, significant health benefit: lowering the risk of severe bacterial infections such as pneumonia and sepsis. A new explanation for these findings has been discovered by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, who describe for the first time how statins activate the bacterial killing properties of white blood cells.
The research is published in the November ...
Health literacy impacts chance of heart failure hospitalization, study says
2010-11-18
Being able to read and understand words like anemia, hormones and seizure means a patient with heart failure may be less likely to be hospitalized, according to a new study from Emory University School of Medicine. Findings will be presented Nov. 17 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions conference in Chicago.
The research, led by Emory cardiologist Javed Butler, MD, MPH, professor of medicine, Emory School of Medicine and director of Heart Failure Research at Emory Healthcare, involved the use of a simple test called the Rapid Estimates of Adults Literacy ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Insulin resistance is linked to over 30 diseases – and to early death in women, study of people in the UK finds
Innovative semaglutide hydrogel could reduce diabetes shots to once a month
Weight loss could reduce the risk of severe infections in people with diabetes, UK research suggests
Long-term exposure to air pollution and a lack of green space increases the risk of hospitalization for respiratory conditions
Better cardiovascular health in early pregnancy may offset high genetic risk
Artificial intelligence method transforms gene mutation prediction in lung cancer: DeepGEM data releases at IASLC 2024 World Conference on Lung Cancer
Antibody–drug conjugate I-DXd shows clinically meaningful response in patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer
IASLC Global Survey on biomarker testing reveals progress and persistent barriers in lung cancer biomarker testing
Research shows pathway to developing predictive biomarkers for immune checkpoint inhibitors
Just how dangerous is Great Salt Lake dust? New research looks for clues
Maroulas appointed Associate Vice Chancellor, Director of AI Tennessee
New chickadee research finds cognitive skills impact lifespan
Cognitive behavioral therapy enhances brain circuits to relieve depression
Terasaki Institute awarded $2.3 Million grant from NIH for organ transplantation research using organs-on-a-chip technology
Atoms on the edge
Postdoc takes multipronged approach to muon detection
Mathematical proof: Five satellites needed for precise navigation
Scalable, multi-functional device lays groundwork for advanced quantum applications
Falling for financial scams? It may signal early Alzheimer’s disease
Integrating MRI and OCT for new insights into brain microstructure
Designing a normative neuroimaging library to support diagnosis of traumatic brain injury
Department of Energy announces $68 million in funding for artificial intelligence for scientific research
DOE, ORNL announce opportunity to define future of high-performance computing
Molecular simulations, supercomputing lead to energy-saving biomaterials breakthrough
Low-impact yoga and exercise found to help older women manage urinary incontinence
Genetic studies reveal new insights into cognitive impairment in schizophrenia
Researcher develops technology to provide cleaner energy and cleaner water
Expect the unexpected: nanoscale silver unveils intrinsic self-healing abilities
nTIDE September 2024 Jobs Report: Gains in employment for people with disabilities appear to level off after reducing gaps with non-disabled workers
Wiley enhances NMR Spectral Library Collection with extensive new databases
[Press-News.org] The lifeblood of leaves: Vein networks control plant patternsUniversity of Arizona graduate student Benjamin Blonder may have solved the mystery of how leaf vein patterns correlate with use of sunlight, carbon and other nutrients