Shining Light into a "Black Box": Essential Rationale Underlying Multiphase Flash Methodology.

The world we live in is very fragile. Sustainable food production is increasingly under intense pressure due to changing environmental conditions on many levels. Understanding the complexities of how to optimize food production under increasingly deleterious environmental conditions is dependent upon accurate and detailed analyses of plant productivity from the molecular-to-the-remote scales.

The rapid A-C response: photosynthesis in the phenomic era.

Phenotyping for photosynthetic gas exchange parameters is limiting our ability to select plants for enhanced photosynthetic carbon gain and to assess plant function in current and future natural environments. This is due, in part, to the time required to generate estimates of the maximum rate of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (Rubisco) carboxylation (V ) and the maximal rate of electron transport (J ) from the response of photosynthesis (A) to the CO concentration inside leaf air spaces (C ). To relieve this bottleneck, we developed a method for rapid photosynthetic carbon assimilation CO responses [rapid A-C response (RACiR)] utilizing non-steady-state measurements of gas exchange.