(From Science Daily) A tiny, little-understood plant pore has enormous implications for weather forecasting, climate change, agriculture, hydrology, and more. A study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the Research Center Jülich in Germany, has now overturned the conventional belief about how these important structures called stomata regulate water vapor loss from the leaf-a process called transpiration. They found that radiation is the driving force of physical processes deep within the leaf.

The research is published the week of July 12, 2010, in the on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stomata are lip-shaped pores surrounded by a pair of guard cells that control the size of the opening. The size of the pores regulates the inflow of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) needed for photosynthesis and the outflow of water vapor to the atmosphere — transpiration.

Transpiration cools and humidifies the atmosphere over vegetation, moderating the climate and increasing precipitation. Stomata influence the rate at which plants can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, which affects the productivity of plants and the concentration of atmospheric CO2. Understanding stoma is important for climate change research.

Current climate change models use descriptions of stomatal response based on statistical analysis of studies conducted with a few plant species. This approach is not based on a solid understanding of the mechanism of stomatal regulation and provides a poor basis for extrapolating to environmental conditions.

“Scientists have been studying stomata for at least 300 years. It’s amazing that we have not had good grasp about the regulatory mechanisms that control how much stomata open or close in response to a constantly changing environment,” remarked co-author Joseph Berry of Carnegie.

For the first time, these researchers looked at how the exchange of energy and water vapor at the outer surface of the leaf are linked to processes inside the leaf. They found that the energy from radiation absorbed by pigments and water inside the leaf influences how the stomata control water levels.

Read more here: Plant ‘Breathing’ Mechanism Discovered