Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a university sending out a press release showing the potential benefits on crop yields of elevated atmospheric CO2 levels. – Anthony
Public release date: 9-Feb-2009
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoia-hcb020609.php
Contact: Diana Yates
217-333-5802
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
High CO2 boosts plant respiration, potentially affecting climate and crops
The leaves of soybeans grown at the elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels predicted for the year 2050 respire more than those grown under current atmospheric conditions, researchers report, a finding that will help fine-tune climate models and could point to increased crop yields as CO2 levels rise. The study, from researchers at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere and make sugars through the process of photosynthesis. But they also release some CO2 during respiration as they use the sugars to generate energy for self-maintenance and growth. How elevated CO2 affects plant respiration will therefore influence future food supplies and the extent to which plants can capture CO2 from the air and store it as carbon in their tissues. While there is broad agreement that higher atmospheric CO2 levels stimulate photosynthesis in C3 plants, such as soybean, no such consensus exists on how rising CO2 levels will affect plant respiration.
IMAGE: Andrew Leakey and assistants at work in the Soy FACE facility at Illinois. Click here for more information.
“There’s been a great deal of controversy about how plant respiration responds to elevated CO2,” said U. of I. plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, who led the study. “Some summary studies suggest it will go down by 18 percent, some suggest it won’t change, and some suggest it will increase as much as 11 percent.” Understanding how the respiratory pathway responds when plants are grown at elevated CO2 is key to reducing this uncertainty, Leakey said.
His team used microarrays, a genomic tool that can detect changes in the activity of thousands of genes at a time, to learn which genes in the high CO2 plants were being switched on at higher or lower levels than those of the soybeans grown at current CO2 levels. Rather than assessing plants grown in chambers in a greenhouse, as most studies have done, Leakey’s team made use of the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (Soy FACE) facility at Illinois. This open-air research lab can expose a soybean field to a variety of atmospheric CO2 levels – without isolating the plants from other environmental influences, such as rainfall, sunlight and insects. Some of the plants were exposed to atmospheric CO2 levels of 550 parts per million (ppm), the level predicted for the year 2050 if current trends continue. These were compared to plants grown at ambient CO2 levels (380 ppm).
The results were striking. At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels. This explained how the plants were able to use the increased supply of sugars from stimulated photosynthesis under high CO2 conditions to produce energy, Leakey said. The rate of respiration increased 37 percent at the elevated CO2 levels. The enhanced respiration is likely to support greater transport of sugars from leaves to other growing parts of the plant, including the seeds, Leakey said. “The expression of over 600 genes was altered by elevated CO2 in total, which will help us to understand how the response is regulated and also hopefully produce crops that will perform better in the future,” he said.
IMAGE: Illinois plant biology professor Andrew Leakey led a team that discovered that soybean leaves speed up their metabolism in response to rising CO2. Click here for more information.
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See the following for information about why disused genes don’t necessarily disappear.
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=193
Richard Sharpe (10:50:21) :
Phil. (09:52:55) says:
Barry B. (08:31:12) :
Gary (05:59:30) :
Respiration in plants is not the same as with animals. In fact, it is just the opposite. Plants take in CO2 & release O2.
Actually it is the same, plants take in CO2, water and sunlight and produce sugars and O2, this is photosynthesis. At the same time they also consume the sugars using O2 and produce CO2 and water (this is the only process occurring at night), this is respiration.
This is as I understand it and has been confirmed by Google, and commenters here.
This report refers to a higher level of CO2 resulting in a higher level of respiration, i.e. consumption of the sugars.
Can you provide a little explanation? How does higher levels of CO2 yield higher levels of respiration when CO2 does not seem to be an input to the chemical reaction? Also, wouldn’t the higher partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere tend to depress the reaction? (Of course, this is just pure speculation on my part.)
According to their paper “At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels.” There’s no reason to expect that CO2 would inhibit the reaction, it’s not equilibrium.
That nice Miss Gray said: (18:32:13) :
“We have genes (and even some body parts) that serve no purpose whatsoever”
The few ladies of my intimate acquaintance have told me that.
Here is another little goodie. Seems some greenies got sued over global warming!
“…A group of Spanish homeowners and real estate developers have filed suit against Greenpeace for its global warming campaign, which they say has caused a steep decrease in the price of their beachfront properties.
The suit — which the developers plan to present unless Greenpeace agrees to a settlement of nearly $50M — is over resort properties in La Manga del Mar Menor, in Southwest Spain. Greenpeace, in their recent book Photoclima, prominently featured digitally altered photographs of the resort, with only the tops of apartment buildings, hotels, and palm trees barely visible above a flooded sea. The book also showed before-and-after photos of Spain’s lush lemon and orange growing region of Valencia, transformed into an arid desert. “We want[ed] to create alarm and a call to action”, said Juan Lopez de Uralde, Greenpeace’s director in Spain.
The photos created a sense of alarm in La Manga, with property values dropping by 50 percent after the book appeared….”
http://www.dailytech.com/Greenpeace+Sued+Over+False+Global+Warming+Claims/article12070.htm
Pamela Gray says:
I think I detect a case of survivor bias here.
Quite a number of fetuses spontaneously abort. The number of male fetuses that do so is larger than the number of female fetuses.
Then there are mutations and problems that allow the fetus to get to term but fail to survive to adulthood or have no offspring. Then there are the mutations that are useful in the presence of malaria but come with a disadvantage if you don’t live in a place with high malaria, and so on.
I think that, in fact, pretty much all of our genes have selective value, and there is good evidence that selection on humans has sped up over the last 10,000 years (See The 10,000 Year Explosion, for example). Just try to tell all the lineages that are no longer around that most of our genes do not have selective value. I think they would disagree with you if they could.
Secondly, random mutations in non-functional genes are going to quickly lead to a situation where those genes cannot be switched back on again.
As to non-functional body parts, many of those are because of higher level pathways that are hard to switch off. The only male mammals without nipples that I am aware of are horses, and without a penis most males find it hard to reproduce (to cite just another example of an oft claimed useless appendage).
Phil. (19:02:39) says:
I know you are not involved with writing the paper, but the next question is why are respiration genes being switched on in the presence of higher CO2 levels?
Perhaps because higher levels of photosynthesis are occurring producing more food for the plant. (I like to tease these implications out …)
Richard Sharpe (19:30:05) :
I think that, in fact, pretty much all of our genes have selective value, and there is good evidence that selection on humans has sped up over the last 10,000 years (See The 10,000 Year Explosion, for example).
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Richard, there is a huge amount of excellent literature on our genes having selective value – at pre-reproductive ages (not surprisingly). Similarly, the evolutionary biology of aging literature demonstrates how and why the lack of selection of post-reproductive beneficial genes leads to our individual (early, in my opinion) demise. Darwinian evolution has not come even close to keeping up with brain development with respect to the potential life span of today’s human. Given the ability to fight off/kill/avoid predators, and also kill bacterial, viral and parasitic pathogens, the normal human life span could easily average 1,000 years (at a guess, by me). Unfortunately, the genes and gene products we currently own will not cooperate, so we should be looking to the Kurzweil singularity for immortality (with a low carbon footprint, I might add) if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
And to the guy who thinks Kary Mullis is a moron. I know the guy, and have had the pleasure of having a “couple” of beers with him on more than one occasion. He’s on the opposite end of the Gaussian distribution re. intelligence. Some people !! Just because you have a Nobel Prize DOES NOT automatically mean you are a moron. That kind of thinking is true only in the AGW field !! Jeeeez.
Ugh! Can you imagine having to pay taxes for a thousand years??? Especially carbon taxes…
Ric Werme, you may well be right. Although in my defence I’d say the phrasing is somewhat ambiguous.
And like most good science the study raises interesting questions, which I hope are pursued, despite the threat to AGW orthodoxy.
For anyone still reading this, here is a short description of how genes have ‘on/off’ and ‘dimmer’ switches.
http://www.fabinet.up.ac.za/featuredpublication/creux2006
thefordprefect (11:48:11) :
from the study (1997?) that purportedly puts a lie to the one being discussed here:
“maximum yields occurred near 0.10 and 0.12% CO2 and decreased significantly thereafter.”
They’re speaking in terms of percentage, not PPM. Shifty. since co2 is currently 0.03% of the atmosphere, 0.12 represents about 1500PPM!!! So when are we going to reach those levels? ever?
mark b (18:22:25) :
“Of course CO2 is helpful to plants, it’s plant food. We can think of it like fertilizer. It is helpful, the only problem is that if you use too much it becomes detrimental to the plants. So we get a bell-shaped curve. So how do we know how much is too much, or have we already gone past that?”
See above
We have miles of genes that are not necessary for successful longevity of our species. They may have been closely connected with (IE physically near to) another gene that was. But that means that in the first case, the unnecessary gene just came along for the ride. I hate to burst bubbles but lots and lots of human (and other animal and plant kingdom) genes are just not that important to our survival. They are simply the vagaries of gene duplication and the mutation process that is a random occurrence for the most part. Survival-important mutations are far and few between.
Can you provide a little explanation? How does higher levels of CO2 yield higher levels of respiration when CO2 does not seem to be an input to the chemical reaction?
You are thinking in terms of a chemical/biochemical chain of reactions.
What happens is through some biochemical pathway higher CO2 levels are detected and as a result genes are switched on or switched on at a higher level. These genes then express whatever it is they do. Their only relation to higher CO2 levels is their expression is useful at higher CO2 levels.
Which environmental triggers result in which gene expression is the result of random mutations and natural selection. Often the mechanisms seems strange and not a relationship between trigger and expression that one would rationally choose.
Someone yesterday used the phrase ‘Good enough for evolutionary work’ to describe how the mechanisms often look kludged together to us rational beings.
BTW, he was referring to the fact humans don’t have a mechanism to detect when O2 levels in our lungs fall to levels that would kill us. All we can detect is high levels of CO2. This is because evolution would never have encountered pure N2 or Argon environments.
And if someone finds we do have an unexpressed gene to detect pure N2 then that would be compelling evidence of space flight in our evolutionary history. 🙂
Phillip, the article you referred to regarding on/off and dimmer functions has to do with an active gene segment that gets turned on and off as will as dims by regulatory genes near them. I think we were talking about what happens to genes that are never used, which translates to body parts/functions we don’t use or that are not essential to survival. Think of all the things about us that serve no survival function. Yet we keep getting born with these things. The article I included in my above post does a very good job of explaining that the belief, if you don’t use it you lose, is a myth.
Pamela Gray (21:27:31) :
I hate to burst bubbles but lots and lots of human (and other animal and plant kingdom) genes are just not that important to our survival. They are simply the vagaries of gene duplication and the mutation process that is a random occurrence for the most part. Survival-important mutations are far and few between.
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Housekeeping genes may not have great selective pressures, but survival important mutations, i.e. pre-reproductive genes have already been mutated for millions of years to be currently-accepted as “normal” 85-years-to-death human genes. At the time they were mutated, they were just planning on, directing even, getting through 4 or 8 or 10 pregnancies (by the age of 20 or so), not 85 years. For us post-antibiotic, post predator-death folks, the long, but not long enough life span encoded by our gene collection is just a bonus.
I’m intrigued by the fact that big trees can get through 100,000 years of Ice Age cycles. I wonder if there are vestiges of appropriate, reactivatable genes carried through such time scales, or if they have to start all over. Or if their progeny just moving closer to the tropics for the odd 100,000 years or so, and then migrating back, is the evolutionary mechanism.
If only Al Gore’s brain could assimilate what piss-ant creatures we are …..
… him in particular
Pamela, every gene and every capability expressed from a gene has a cost (you can think of cost as finding food to fuel it). Natural selection over time will select those genes and capabilities that deliver the most value for the least cost and lose all other genes and their expressions.
In your link above, the fact that cave dwelling fish always loose their sight is compelling evidence of this principal operating. Eyes have no value in the dark, so natural selection gets rid of them.
BTW, I don’t buy the writer’s argument that eyes are lost in cave dwelling fish due to the development of some other hunting capability. Although, evolution frequently reuses some existing capability in a new way, Read Dawkins on the evolution of the eye.
Eyes will be lost. New hunting capabilities will develope. Eyes may be reused for the new hunting capabilities. There is no necessary relationship.
Anyway we are getting OT for Anthony’s blog.
Although we did manage to discuss evolution without the vitriol and personal denigration that occurs in another prominent contender for Best Science Blog.
Kaboom (01:23:58) : Ian Pringle, unfortunately the Eucalypt is an incendiary device […]The poor old gum tree is the culprit, as to why you cannot out-run or out-drive a proper Australian bushfire – the fire-front of exploding Eucalyptus trees travels at up to 100 Km per hour, depending upon wind.
Topping eh? Hang on a mo… i drive closer to 75 mph which my spread sheet says is about 120 km/hr so can I move to Australia mate?
Best vacation I ever had…
Loved my trip from Sydney to the Back ‘O Burke where I bought a round for the whole bar (3 guys) and never bought another beer all day… then back out through what you blokes call mountains and we call hills; to Melbourne where I saw 100 yards of people on “90 mile beach” with 89.99 miles of empty white sand the other direction… and a fond memory of bar hopping with great food and entertainment downtown… Sigh. ( If you meet anyone named “Sumner” they may be relatives, so ask them if they have a great uncle or great grandad sailor named Joseph Sumner, if so I’d appreciate if you bought ’em a beer… about 1900 my great uncle moved down under…)
So can I come? Can I can I can I huh????
I even have a great love of Eucalyptus! We have lots of them here in California even though rabid greens have gone on a jihad trying to get them all cut down as ‘foreign’… (Greens with saws? Yup. Fascists know a movement when they see one.) Frankly, I can’t imagine California without 100 foot tall blue gums and the ironbarks lining the boulevard… but what do I know, I’m only a native son here…
But yeah, they burn well. Berkeley learned that a few years ago when the hills went up in flames. Good luck with the fire… I did a stint as a fire fighter here one summer; it’s not easy. ( I lasted about a week, till the fire was out, and never went back. Something about working 16+ hours a day in the full summer sun, near a fire, with pasty white skin and a sack lunch… I’d have probably stuck it out, but my boots didn’t fit well and the blisters got to me…)
So take care and be well… and remember that it’s only nature. you can beat it. Even if the CO2 is making them grow 40% faster…
Terry Ward (01:41:28) : It is just about useful for animal feed, but if I ruled the world it wouldn’t even be allowed for that purpose.
Curious… Why? Isn’t a plant just a plant? Near 50% oil and most of the rest protein that’s a great animal food…
Yes, I’d grow more sorghum, millet & amaranth, and if in a cold area, kale or peas, but soy is, well, just another high oil content legume.
Hemp seed on the other hand…….,
Decent oil & protein content. Good fiber production. Wide climate range. Decent crop. Superior to soy? Depends on the turf…
Is this really fair? The soybeans haven’t had 40 more years of gradual CO2 increases to acclimate themselves. This is like taking the soybeans and growing them in a green house that’s 10°C above normal to see how they’ll grow in the year 2100. Everything will adapt and so sudden changes cannot really show what will happen in 40-90 years from now.
Mike McMillan (02:24:19) : Hi again, E.M. I’ve hung around farms and cows enough that the periodic terrorist anthrax scares don’t apply to me.
Ah, the fond memories of biology class in a small farm town… pictures of black spots on skin and the discussions of ‘wool sorters disease’ (aka topical anthrax). Yeah, been there… (About 2 years ago there was a report of a ‘local’ with a half dozen cows one of which got anthrax from the local dirt where it lives… Not a big deal when you grow up with it – and have a bottle of doxycycline in the fridge.)
I know Purina makes those Chows, but other than Trout Chow (or Catfish Chow), farmers would go broke if they tried to raise a herd on them.
Purely a rhetorical device. “Rolling your own” feed is always more efficient for a family farm. (I’ve started making my own cat food. Something in the commercial stuff is making the cats ‘not quite right’ – chinese melamine? Anyway, cooked bird with juices and 1/3 cooked rice through the sausage machine. But I digress…)
I bought some toasted soy ‘nuts’ at the grocery the other day. Toasty, crunchy, oily, no flavor. Won’t buy more.
http://www.unitedsoybean.org/FileDownload.aspx?file=United%20States%20Soybean%20Domestic%20Consumption%20Presentation%20(USB.ppt
Says most goes to chickens, pigs, cows, etc. who luckily don’t seem to care much about the low flavor, estrogen analogs and impact on thyroid function… Eat it myself? Rarely if I can avoid it, sometimes in an asian dish if it’s a small part. I kind of like the green ones served with sushi though… Edamame? But bottom line is you will get no argument from me about it being chicken feed first and foremost! (And Diesel feed second 😉
Net Ecosystem Carbon Exchange (NEE) using Eddy Covariant Flux Measurement is interesting… (checking the balance between Co2 going in due to photosynthesis, and the Co2 going out due to respiration).
I’m no scientist, but looking at some of the data from Duke University it shows that more Co2 is going in to the vegetation than is coming out, and that over time the amout of Co2 taken out of the atmosphere by the vegetation is increasing.
NEE* 2000 -760 g C m-²
NEE* 1999 -630 g C m-²
NEE* 1998 -580 g C m-²
*Net Ecosystem Carbon Exchange
JimB (03:03:12) : E.M….taking your lead from Al? Getting in on the ground floor?…building a “bunny offset trading market” all in the name of CO2-enhancement?
Well, I can learn.. if slowly!
Your true colors finally show!…you…you…evildoer, you!
On the other hand…rabbits are quite tasty ;*)
(Hey…someone had to do it…)
Snicker… Yeah, someone, I guess…
As a child we raised rabbits ‘for the pot’ and I’ve dispatched and consumed many (Dad wanting me to be ready with all skills needed for the next Great Depression). I now have a ‘dozen head’ of freeloading free range bunnies in the back 40 — square yards; that I serve dinner to nightly but just can’t quite bring myself to dispatch; sometimes I wonder if evolution has dealt me a bum hand… They are so cute and intelligent… and tasty… (WHACK!)
Chickens on the other hand, I’ll ‘dispatch’ in a moment… even if I’m not hungry… the mean little b[self snip]’s …
B Kerr (03:46:55) : Yes a special BUNNY DOCTOR.
Edinburgh University has the first Bunny Doctor.
This actually makes sense… bunnies have some peculiarities that the typical vet may not know about. Things like an antibiotics can kill them by killing off the normal ‘gut flora’ that they need as a ruminant… It took me a while to find a vet who knew how to care for mine. (Yes, i’ve been turned from farmer to ‘servant to bunnies’… Oh the shame….)
So you all really really do need to send me your bunny offset payments very soon so that I can buy more bunny kibble… and avoid the terrible Were-Rabbit visiting your back yard 😉
Pamela Gray (21:36:08) :
Phillip, the article you referred to regarding on/off and dimmer functions has to do with an active gene segment that gets turned on and off as will as dims by regulatory genes near them. I think we were talking about what happens to genes that are never used, which translates to body parts/functions we don’t use or that are not essential to survival.
When I was growing up tonsils and the appendix were considered not essential to survival and were routinely cut off to “avoid possible troubles”. It took the AIDS scare and the enormous attention to immunity issues that high lighted their function as antibody factories. In a similar way, many genes that are thought “not to be used” might prove to be quite useful. Our ignorance is much larger than our knowledge in these issues, imho.
Gary (05:59:30) : Folks seem to be misreading this news release. The researcher was looking at plant respiration, not photosynthesis. Respiration in plants is essentially the same as in animals: it uses O2 and releases CO2.
While you are correct, the implication is that the plant is growing more. More photosynthesis leads to more growth (so more respiration) and since most folks are focusing on that growth, the difference between photosynthesis and respiration is a bit pedantic in this context …
@Ken Hall (06:04:26) : “At what level of concentration does this ability for plants to soak up more CO2 kick in? ”
Any.
CO2 is clearly a ‘rate limiting nutrient’. As such, any increase will result in increased plant growth. It ought to be ‘concentration proportional’ up to the full utilization level. Elsewhere I’ve seen this reported as about 1000 to 2000 ppm. This, IMHO, is clear evidence that most life on this planet evolved to expect 1000ppm+ and has had it for most of evolutionary history (and would want it again…)
That, to me, is the strongest possible argument that added CO2 is a very good thing…
Tom in Florida (08:11:28) :
Bruce cobb: “Unfortunately, as temperature decrease, so does the enhancing effect of raised C02, and with anything below a daily mean of 18.5C (65.3F) an increased C02 level actually decreases plant growth, according to a study by climate physicist Sherwood Idso. ”
Another reason we need a warmer Earth. Warmer is better.
This will be wildly dependent on crop type. Kale & Turnips, for example, are best after frost (with Kale even living in snowfall…) while many kinds of tomato need over 80F to set fruit… I would not trust a ‘climate physicist’ to do my agronomy research…
But yes, warmer is better. ( I like citrus, avocado, coconuts, cocoa, coffee, tomatoes, …)