Speaker: Distinguished Professor Emeritus J. Clark Lagarias of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Davis
In agriculture, it’s important to understand how plants acclimate to growing in the shade of their neighbors. Photoreceptors tell a plant whether it’s in the shade or full sun by sensing the color of light reaching the plant. Most plants respond to the shade of nearby plants by growing faster to reach out of the shadows — a change that could divert energy that farmers and breeders might prefer went to producing more seed crop. Such enhanced stem elongation in turn contributes to increased lodging and early flowering, others source of yield loss. Lagarias calls such competition for full sun, known as shade avoidance behavior, an “arms race” between plants. “If you want to get more yield per acre, you want to regulate or eliminate this response,” Lagarias said. “It’s critical to understand the mechanism of that so one can interfere or bypass it, or use other means to avoid this arms race and enhance crop yield.”