Root-Derived Bicarbonate Assimilation in Plants

This book summarizes the physiological effects of bicarbonate in plants and systematically introduces readers to a bidirectional isotope labeling tracer technique used to quantify the contribution of root-derived bicarbonate to total photosynthetic inorganic carbon assimilation in plants. This method helps to shed light on the role of dissolved inorganic carbon from the soil in overall photosynthesis, an aspect that has been underestimated or neglected entirely in the past.

The book quantifies the capacity for root-derived bicarbonate assimilation in certain plant species and illustrates the coupling relationship between karstification and photosynthesis. Further, it demonstrates that root-derived bicarbonate utilization is as important as stomatal-derived inorganic carbon assimilation in biological evolution and plant adaptation to the environment. Using numerous models, it also illustrates carbon isotopic mixtures in complex inorganic carbon utilization and supplements the results with numerical calculations presented as tables and figures. In short, the book offers a strikingly new perspective on photosynthesis.

Yanyou Wu is a Professor of Plant Physiology and Ecology at the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Geochemistry, Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. He received a BS degree (1986) in Biology from Department of Biology, Anhui Normal University, China; a master’s degree (1989) in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry from Department of Agronomy, Guizhou University, China; and a doctorate (1994) in Botany from the Department of Biology, Sichuan University, China.

In Dr. Wu’s early years, he mainly devoted himself to explain the fertility of some intergeneric hybrids with " cell fusion - chromosome set segregation" and the extended genetic laws. In recent 20 years, his scholarly activities have been switched to the areas of the adaptive mechanism of karst-adaptable plants, the technology and principle of selection on karst-adaptable plants, the determining the biological and environmental information, the application and determination of electrophysiological information in plants, and biogeochemical action of carbonic anhydrase. He published 13 monographs and more than 200 papers in journals. In addition, he held 63 invention patents of the People's Republic of China. His scholarly contributions appeared in Photosynthesis Research, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, Transactions of the ASABE, Chinese Science Bulletin, Biological Trace Element Research, Scientia Horticulturae, Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture, Energy Conversion and Management, Photosynthetica, Acta Physiologiae Plantarum and Physiologiae Plantarum, among others. 

Sen Rao received a BS degree in Forestry from Department of Forestry, Guizhou University, China and a doctorate supervised by Professor Yanyou Wu in Environmental Science from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Dr. Rao’s scholarly activities have been found in the areas of biogeochemical process of inorganic carbon in soil-plant-atmosphere, plant carbon allocation and photosynthetic carbon isotope discrimination. His scholarly contributions appeared in Photosynthesis Research, Physiologia Plantarum and Energies, among others.