Morgan
Furze
Post-Doctoral Associate, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Yale University
Understanding Whole-plant Nonstructural Carbohydrate Storage in a
Changing World
Join colleagues and friends for this week’s Environmental Sciences
Seminar, with guest speaker Dr. Morgan Furze.
More about Dr. Furze’s talk:
Nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs) play a critical
role in plant physiology and metabolism. When NSCs are stored, they serve as a
food pantry that enables sessile, long-lived plants to survive during
unfavorable environmental conditions when their ability to make new NSCs is
impaired. While there is growing evidence linking NSCs with stress tolerance
and survival, critical questions about the size of the carbohydrate “food
pantry” and how quickly it is used up and replenished remain unresolved. In
this seminar Dr. Furze will share two stories about trees, one close to home
and one across the globe. First, she quantified carbohydrate storage in
temperate species at Harvard Forest to determine the size and seasonal dynamics
of whole-tree NSC reserves over the course of a year. Second, she combined a
long-term warming experiment with 13C-CO2 pulse labeling and compound-specific
isotope analysis to trace sugars throughout whole-trees exposed to warming
representative of future temperature predictions for Australia. Dr. Furze will
end by discussing how novel in vivo techniques hold promise for monitoring
NSCs, and how together these tools will help to improve our ability to predict
plant responses to stress in a changing world.