Growing plants in fluctuating environments: Why bother?

Abstract

Light and temperature are highly dynamic environmental factors, but plant science research frequently ignores this variation to allow reproducible growth-chamber experiments. Using Arabidopsis and looking at changes over a 24 h period, Annunziata et al. (2018) scrutinized changes in metabolites and gene expression of circadian oscillator components under naturally varying light and temperature. They show that fluctuations modify systems organization and outputs, and propose that diel metabolism is adapted to covariation of light and temperature.