“Plants Have Mouths–And They Could Help Agriculture Adapt to Climate Change” is the title of a recent article in the December 17, 2022 issue of Modern Farmer that caught my eye. Plants have mouths? I never thought of plants having mouths, but surprisingly they do. Scientists have determined that the stomata functions as a plant's mouth.
The stomata are cell structures/microscopic spores on the epidermis of plant leaves. When the stomata cells open, they breath in carbon dioxide and convert them into the the nutrients they need to survive. When the stomata opens its spores to take in carbon dioxide, “the inside of the plant is exposed to the elements, causing water to get lost in the surrounding air. If too much water is lost, that's when plants dry out.”
Now scientists at the University of California in San Diego, with funding from the National Science Foundation, have “have found an elusive molecular pathway that plants use to direct their ‘breathing' of carbon dioxide.” Basically, they discovered “that plants are able to sense carbon dioxide levels in their surroundings, and then control their stomata based on how much CO2 they want to suck up. In a sense, plants can regulate their breathing.” They hope that their discovery will enable them to engineer plants, i.e. create new crop plants in the future that can retain water better during droughts, and as the carbon dioxide levels increase as the planet heats up, In fact, they have “filed a patent and are examining ways to translate their findings into tools for crop breeders and farmers.”
You can read the full article at https://modernfarmer.com/2022/12/plants-have-mouths/., and more about their discovery at https://beta.nsf.gov/science-matters/scientists-discover-mechanism-plants-use-control.
And by the way, the word stomata stems from the Greek word stoma, which translates into mouth.