Brown is the New Green

Plants and trees are unusually vulnerable to the increased temperatures experienced as the Earth warms.  In response, several species of trees and grasses have evolved in novel ways to adapt to these conditions.

Scientists discovered that several species of grass had developed an alternative to photosynthesis, allowing them to flourish as temperatures rise.  The evolved plants exchange carbon dioxide through their stomata using a process called chemosynthesis. Chlorophyll, which is responsible for the green color in plants, is no longer involved in the plant respiratory cycle, hence the resulting grasses have a brown, lifeless appearance.  Significantly, when examined at the cellular level, these species are robustly healthy.

“I was completely taken aback,” said Professor Theresa Green, from Oakwood College of Science and Technology, “We thought the grasses we were studying were dead, but under the microscope, they were alive and well.” The rapidity of plants modifying themselves to use chemosynthesis as a respiratory option has astonished scientists. Similar findings are being noted in the forests in the Sierra Nevada. Large swaths of trees thought to be dead are actually alive with their own modifications of the chemosynthesis process.

Unpublished data demonstrates the same cellular changes are being found in the other plants studied by Professor Green.  Green summarized her thoughts stating, “The plants that can adapt to the warming planet will survive. Others will simply go away. We will be looking at a very different world in the next twenty to thirty years.”

Last, bud not leaf, other investigators are examining these new processes to identify if any of these new findings can be applied to humans as we navigate a changing planet Earth. That odds of finding something applicable are probably one in a melon.