EBIO Recent PublicationsNotable Research PublicationsRead about some of the more notable research publications our faculty, and students, have produced recently.  Professors Barbara Demmig-Adams and William Adams were featured in an article in the Daily Camera on 4/25/07 entitled "Searching for a solution. Looking for a few tough plants". Barbara Demmig-Adams and William-Adams plan to contribute to the development of new, highly stress-resistant, and perennial crops for biofuel production with low requirements for irrigation and fertilizers. A recent review on their work on stress resistance mechanisms unique to evergreen plants can be found at: Professors William Adams and Barbara Demmig-Adams were featured in an 2005 NSF Nugget, a report by the National Science Foundation to Congress, about important new research findings. Together with postdoctoral student from France, Véronique Amiard , and EBIO graduate student, Tina Mueh , William Adams and Barbara Demmig-Adams identified differences in the ability of plants with different carbon export pathways to adjust their photosynthetic capacity to changes in the environment. [Nugget file] Their findings were also reported in a 2005 publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Amiard V, Mueh KE, Demmig-Adams B, Ebbert V, Turgeon R, Adams WW III (2005) Anatomical and photosynthetic acclimation to the light environment in species with differing mechanisms of phloem loading. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 102 : 12968-12973 < www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0503784102 > Professors Schmidt and Martin in Science - September 2003 Schadt, CW, Martin, AP, Lipson, DA, Schmidt, SK (2003) Seasonal dynamics of previously unknown fungal lineages in tundra soils. Science 301: 1359-1361. Acompanying commentary: Pennisi, E (2003) Neither cold nor snow stops tundra fungi. Science 301: 1307. Cool stuff about a virtual garden of fungi living under the snow and driving winter biogeochemical cycles. Steve, Andy and students used molecular and ecological techniques to demonstrate an incredible diversity of fungi under tundra snow, including representatives of three new branches on the fungal phylogenetic tree. Part I of the article in Science (PDF format) Monson lab in Nature - March 2003 Rosenstiel, T.N., Potosnak, M.J., Griffin, K.L., Fall, R. and Monson, R.K. (2003) Increased CO 2 uncouples growth and isoprene emission in an agriforest ecosystem. Nature 421: 256-259. In the paper we report on our experiments using a model poplar agriforest ecosystem in the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona and biochemical experiments here at CU. As the global coverage of agriforest ecosystems increases, we predict increased emissions of isoprene, with concomitant increases in the production of tropospheric ozone and other pollutants. We discovered that elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentrations cause a decrease in the emission of isoprene and production of secondary pollutants from the model agriforest poplar plantation, and we showed that the biochemical cause of this effect is an increased activity of the enzyme PEP carboxylase and its increased use of phosphoenol pyruvate, which is a precursor to isoprene biosynthesis. In essence, we discovered that one type of pollutant (CO 2 produced from fossil fuel combustion) works against a second type of pollutant (ozone produced after oxidation of isoprene).
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