Craig Brodersen
Yale University, CT·Plant Science & Agriculture
Leaves face a constant trade-off. They must open tiny pores called stomata to take in the carbon dioxide (CO2) needed for photosynthesis, but the same pores let water escape.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Ecology & Evolution
Biophysics
- Topics
stomata
guard cells
turgor pressure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Measure guard cell and epidermal cell turgor pressure directly in living leaves, using a laser-induced gas bubble whose collapse rate reveals the pressure inside the cell.
- Test whether flowering plants (angiosperms) maintain higher guard cell turgor than ferns, lycophytes and gymnosperms, and whether this supports their higher rates of photosynthesis.
- Link guard cell anatomy, hormone signaling, mechanical interaction with neighboring epidermal cells, and leaf water transport using direct turgor measurements across vascular plant lineages.
- Determine how stomatal opening and closing are regulated under drought and heatwave stress, and how this regulation protects the leaf's water-conducting network from hydraulic failure.
More about the research
Stomata open when a pair of guard cells fills with water and builds up internal pressure, called turgor, and they close when that pressure drops. Turgor is central to how plants balance growth against drying out, yet no one has had a way to measure it directly in living, photosynthesizing leaves. That gap matters for understanding how crops and wild plants cope with drought and heatwaves.
Why it matters
Knowing how guard cell pressure controls water loss and photosynthesis could help explain how farm crops and natural ecosystems stay productive and resilient under drought and heatwaves. The results could inform work on agricultural systems important to food security as the climate changes. They will also clarify how stomatal control evolved across plant lineages.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Helen Holmlund
Pepperdine University, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Compare water-use anatomy and physiology in hydrated, closely related desiccation-tolerant and non-tolerant ferns and lycophytes across six lineages, to find which traits go with surviving near-complete drying.
Charles Anderson
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Test the "see-saw" hypothesis that grass guard cells swell while neighboring subsidiary cells deflate to open and close stomatal pores rapidly, using the model grass Brachypodium distachyon.
Jessica Gersony
Smith College, MA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Quantify phloem function, the tree's sugar-transport system, in mature forest trees under control and drought conditions, using a forest rainfall-manipulation experiment and Raman spectroscopy to visualize sugars in plant tissue.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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