Plants' secret to surviving shorter days
New research shows how plants have adapted to losing daylight.
In a paper recently published in the journal Plant Physiology, MSU College of Natural Science faculty members Tom Sharkey and Yair Shachar-Hill and their team demonstrated that plants have multiple fine-tuned systems to deal with varying day lengths, which, in turn, could help to develop new crop varieties that can grow in a wider range of climates.
To understand how plants adapt to different day lengths, a team of MSU researchers led by Sharkey and Shachar-Hill, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology, studied a plant called Camelina sativa, a model oilseed crop, using the Mass Spectrometry and Metabolomics Core on MSU’s campus.
Their conclusion: plants have adapted to change the way they use their energy depending on the amount of daylight they receive.
