scholarly journals Responses of Metabolites in Soybean Shoot Apices to Changing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Richard Sicher

Soybean seedlings were grown in controlled environment chambers with CO2partial pressures of 38 (ambient) and 72 (elevated) Pa. Five or six shoot apices were harvested from individual 21- to 24-day-old plants. Metabolites were analyzed by gas chromatography and, out of 21 compounds, only sucrose and fructose increased in response to CO2enrichment. One unidentified metabolite, Unk-21.03 decreased up to 80% in soybean apices in response to elevated CO2. Levels of Unk-21.03 decreased progressively when atmospheric CO2partial pressures were increased from 26 to 100 Pa. Reciprocal transfer experiments showed that Unk-21.03, and sucrose in soybean apices were altered slowly over several days to changes in atmospheric CO2partial pressures. The mass spectrum of Unk-21.03 indicated that this compound likely contained both an amino and carboxyl group and was structurally related to serine and aspartate. Our findings suggested that CO2enrichment altered a small number of specific metabolites in soybean apices. This could be an important step in understanding how plant growth and development are affected by carbon dioxide enrichment.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp de Vrese ◽  
Tobias Stacke ◽  
Jeremy Caves Rugenstein ◽  
Jason Goodman ◽  
Victor Brovkin

AbstractSimple and complex climate models suggest a hard snowball – a completely ice-covered planet – is one of the steady-states of Earth’s climate. However, a seemingly insurmountable challenge to the hard-snowball hypothesis lies in the difficulty in explaining how the planet could have exited the glaciated state within a realistic range of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Here, we use simulations with the Earth system model MPI-ESM to demonstrate that terminal deglaciation could have been triggered by high dust deposition fluxes. In these simulations, deglaciation is not initiated in the tropics, where a strong hydrological cycle constantly regenerates fresh snow at the surface, which limits the dust accumulation and snow aging, resulting in a high surface albedo. Instead, comparatively low precipitation rates in the mid-latitudes in combination with high maximum temperatures facilitate lower albedos and snow dynamics that – for extreme dust fluxes – trigger deglaciation even at present-day carbon dioxide levels.


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