Question: How does your research contribute to decreasing climate change and can you use your knowledge to improve ways for plants to increase oxygen output?

Rosa Sanchez-Lucas answered on 4 Apr 2023:

It is a quite complicate question… When we talk about climate change we need to considered different factors. Climate change exacerbates plant stressors, drought, flooding, heat and cold waves are more frequent, prolonged and stronger. All the life cycles are dependent of temperature and water and air conditions, when we alter these factors we are altering the equilibrium of different organisms, fungi, bacteria, plant and animal with the all the possible interactions, making most probable and unprediceble the disease severity or insect attacks in plants.

I work with plant defence mechanism, these mechanisms sometimes are a quite similar among stressors so I’m trying to find the most beneficial biomolecular changes in plants that cause this plants to be more resistant, trying to reproduce this effect with “artificial” treatments and/or propagate seeds that are predisposed to show these beneficial changes. Subsequently, if we protect forest masses and obtain better adapted plants, they can survive all these stressors events and continue supplying us oxygen.

Moreover, life is equilibrium so growth and defence are like the extremes of a weighting scale, if plants are more resistant naturally they don’t need to afford more defence costs so they can continue growing. Considering that the growth of the plant is caused by photosynthesis and the photosyntesis proccess release oxygen….