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Plant Biology

Photosynthesis

Western University

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Effects Of Elevated Temperature And Elevated Co2 On Leaf Carbon Fluxes In Boreal Conifers: Lab And Field Studies, Mirindi Eric Dusenge Oct 2019

Effects Of Elevated Temperature And Elevated Co2 On Leaf Carbon Fluxes In Boreal Conifers: Lab And Field Studies, Mirindi Eric Dusenge

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rising CO2 may warm northern latitudes up to 10 °C by the end of the century. However, responses of plant physiological processes (such as photosynthesis and respiration) and growth to climate change remain uncertain. Seedlings and mature trees of tamarack (a deciduous species) and black spruce (an evergreen species), North America dominant conifers, were exposed to combined warming (up to +9 ˚C) and elevated CO2 (up to +300 ppm). In seedlings, stomatal conductance (gs) tended to increase with warming in tamarack seedlings, while gsdeclined with warming in spruce. In both species, CO2 had …


Carbon And Nitrogen Dynamics In Plants Grown At Low Co2 Conditions Of The Past, Andre Galvao Duarte Sep 2019

Carbon And Nitrogen Dynamics In Plants Grown At Low Co2 Conditions Of The Past, Andre Galvao Duarte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

For most of the recent evolutionary history of plants, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been far below modern values. However, little is known about how plants grown in a low CO2 environment balance their carbon demand for growth while meeting their requirement for nitrogen acquisition, the establishment of mycorrhizal fungal associations, and the production of defense compounds. Here, I investigated how low CO2 affects Elymus canadensis and Picea mariana by comparing their growth at low and current CO2 concentrations. I found that reduced N availability exacerbated low CO2 effects on growth, and reduced stomatal index and …


Photosynthetic Acclimation To Warming And Elevated Co2 In Two Antarctic Vascular Plant Species, Vi Nt Bui Mar 2016

Photosynthetic Acclimation To Warming And Elevated Co2 In Two Antarctic Vascular Plant Species, Vi Nt Bui

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Climate change can affect the performance of the only two vascular plant species found in Antarctica, Deschampsia antarctica and Colobanthus quitensis. I investigated the response of these two species to warming and elevated CO2 in terms of photosynthesis and leaf anatomy. While photosynthesis increased directly with rising temperature and CO2, it showed no acclimation to changes in growth temperature, and a small degree of acclimation to growth under elevated CO2. Likewise, leaf anatomy displayed little plasticity in response to changes in the growth environment, although D. antarctica’s stomatal groove structure was modified under …


Inferring Plastid Metabolic Pathways Within The Nonphotosynthetic Free-Living Green Algal Genus Polytomella, Sara Asmail Sep 2015

Inferring Plastid Metabolic Pathways Within The Nonphotosynthetic Free-Living Green Algal Genus Polytomella, Sara Asmail

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The advent of photosynthesis facilitated the evolution of aerobic life on Earth. However, species such as Prototheca wickerhamii and Plasmodium falciparum, among many others, have lost photosynthesis and opted for a free-living/parasitic lifestyle. Despite this loss, these species have retained the plastid for its metabolic pathways, without which they would die. Polytomella is a nonphotosynthetic free-living alga, closely related to the photosynthetic model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, and has been shown to lack a plastid genome. I set out to determine Polytomella plastid metabolic pathways using bioinformatics to look for mRNA and DNA homologous sequences matching pathway enzymes in model organisms. …


Effects Of Excitation Pressure On Variegation And Global Gene Expression In Arabidopsis Thaliana, Rainer Bode Dec 2013

Effects Of Excitation Pressure On Variegation And Global Gene Expression In Arabidopsis Thaliana, Rainer Bode

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I assessed the effects of photosystem II excitation pressure on chloroplast biogenesis and leaf sectoring in the Arabidopsis thaliana variegated mutants im, spotty, var1, var2, chs5 and atd2. The plants were grown under varying degrees of excitation pressure induced by growth at increasing irradiance at different temperatures and the extent of variegation was quantified throughout the plant’s development. I found that the degree of variegation was positively correlated with excitation pressure, regardless of whether high light or low temperature was used to induce increased excitation pressure in all the mutants tested. This was irrespective of …