Jeffrey Coker, assistant professor of biology, published a paper titled “Identification, accumulation, and functional prediction of novel tomato transcripts systemically up-regulated after fire damage” in Physiologia Plantarum, an international journal of plant physiology.
Coker says most people believe plants are completely destroyed by fires. However, this is often not the case since some plants are only partially burned above ground and many maintain roots below the ground which are still alive. Coker’s paper shows that plants respond to fire damage by “turning on” a unique set of genes related to defense and basic metabolism which could help plants eventually recover. The paper also describes nine previously undescribed genes in tomato plants.
Physiologia Plantarum is published by the Scandinavian Society for Plant Physiology.