Plants & H2O Lab

The River to the Sky Substack has a new name, because nobody knew what that name meant or that it related to plants. It was a great title, but the new one is is more descriptive. Check it out!

The Plant Connection | H. Jochen Schenk | Substack Stories about (re)discovering our real connections with plants and how they connect us with the biosphere. Click to read The Plant Connection, by H. Jochen Schenk, a Substack publication. Launched 6 months ago.

Here is the latest post on River to the Sky. Please check it out and consider subscribing to the Substack.
https://rivertothesky.substack.com/p/what-is-light

Another cool paper out with some involvement from our lab. Authored by Marin Šako. Matej Kanduč and coauthors, it is entitled "How lipids suppress cavitation in biological fluids". Check it out at:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2025.139286

Also the River to the Sky Substack at https://rivertothesky.substack.com/ now has grown to 20 posts about the science history of our physical connections to plants. Lot's of fun stuff about plants, water, air, and light from the last 3,000 years.

Yes, the physical lab at Cal State Fullerton is now closed, but I have no plans to retire from research. So this FB page will continue, at least for now, despite my distaste for the Mega Corporation and their evil doings. Stay tuned for more good stuff to come, such as how to build a synthetic tree and whether or not root pressure exists.

Redirecting

With the actual lab now closed at Cal State Fullerton, the research continues with collaborators and their students, currently with Kathy Steppe at Ghent University in Belgium, always with Steven Jansen at Ulm University in Germany, and several other places.

In the meantime, check out my new River to the Sky Substack.

River to the sky | H. Jochen Schenk | Substack Stories about discovering our connections with plants and with the atmosphere. Click to read River to the sky, by H. Jochen Schenk, a Substack publication. Launched 2 days ago.

Root pressure? Time to rethink that, at least for bamboos:

Positive pressure in bamboo is generated in stems and rhizomes, not in roots.

Joseph M Michaud, Kerri Mocko, and H. Jochen Schenk. AoB PLANTS, Volume 16, Issue 4, July 2024, plae040 https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plae040

After several years of research on bamboo, our first paper on these cool plants will now be published by the open access journal AoB Plants:

Michaud, J. M., K. Mocko, and H. J. Schenk. 2024. Positive pressure in bamboo is generated in stems and rhizomes, not in roots. AoB Plants: in press

This is based on Joseph Michaud's MS thesis, with help and input from our former postdoc Kerri Mocko. Great to see it published!

A new review paper from our lab with first author Stephen Ingram from the University of Helsinki in Finland and co-author Steven Jansen. Published in the open-access journal Nanomaterials in a special issue on "Nanobubbles and their Applications". Check it out!

Lipid-Coated Nanobubbles in Plants One of the more surprising occurrences of bulk nanobubbles is in the sap inside the vascular transport system of flowering plants, the xylem. In plants, nanobubbles are subjected to negative pressure in the water and to large pressure fluctuations, sometimes encompassing pressure changes of several....

We are pleased to announce the 1st International Meeting on the Gas Phase in Plants, which will take place at the Hyytiälä research station in Finland from 11 until 14 September 2023. Because gases are involved in a wide range of metabolic processes, transport, stress response mechanisms, as well as biotic and abiotic interactions, we are convinced that a meeting that will focus on the gas phase in plants will be a highly exciting interdisciplinary event, bringing together a wide range of scientists. You might be surprised to find out that gasses-related topics in plants have more in common than one would have thought.
The following five sessions have been identified, for which we welcome oral presentations and posters:
1. Gases in leaves (including photosynthesis and respiration)
2. Gases in stems (including embolism formation)
3. Gases in roots
4. Methane and VOCs in plants
5. The role of the microbiome in gas-plant interactions
For more information and registration details, please see: https://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/GPIP23/
The website also includes detailed information about transport from the airport to the Hyytiälä station. The registration deadline is 15 June 2023. The meeting includes the famous Boreal Dinner, an excursion to the SMEAR II station, saunas, the Kota (BBQ in the evening), etc. The local organizing team from the University of Helsinki includes Teemu Hölttä, Timo Vesala, Stephen Ingram, and Paulina Dukat, and the scientific committee includes Jochen Schenk and Steven Jansen as additional members.

Our amazing former postdoc Kerri Mocko has just accepted a tenure-track position as a plant physiologist in the Department of Botany and Planf Ecology at Weber State University in Utah. Congratulations! We are so proud of her!

Amazing news: Cal State Fullerton ranks second in California after Stanford in the citation impact of our research publications and third among public universities nationwide. This is for publications from 2015-19, when CSUF researchers published 3,021 papers that were cited 33,074 times. 12 of those papers were from our lab and were cited 455 times, that's 38 citations on average per publication. Thanks to all the students involved and all our collaborators!

On Research Citation Impact, CSUF Ranks Third Nationally | CSUF News On normalized citation impact, CSUF ranks No. 3 nationally and No. 2 in California, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Here is another recent publication with contributions from our lab on the subject of the gas phase in plants. The title may be read as an homage to the Rolling Stones.

A crucial phase in plants – it's a gas, gas, gas! Click on the article title to read more.

This new open access paper by Shersingh Tumber-Dávila et al. is based on a vastly increased roots database compared to Schenk and Jackson. 2002. Journal of Ecology 90:480-494), which itself was an update of an earlier study (Canadell et al. 1996. Oecologia 108:583-595). The paper contains all roots data in the supplement, and it was great to work with Shersingh on this research.

Plant sizes and shapes above and belowground and their interactions with climate Although the above and belowground sizes and shapes of plants strongly influence plant competition, community structure, and plant–environment interactions, plant sizes and shapes remain poorly ch...