Understanding carbon partitioning and its role in determining plant growth.
Accumulation of wealth requires more than big paychecks. In particular, and relevant to carbon partitioning, how you invest income, and how you spend your income, will have a significant influence on the rate of wealth accumulation. For plants, the partitioning of carbon fixed in photosynthesis (income), to new leaf area, and the maintenance respiration costs of various parts of the plant (carbon spending) will have a significant influence on the rate of plant growth (biomass accumulation). Despite the importance of partitioning to yield and biomass accumulation it has been relatively less studied because of the difficulty in assessing all of the fates of carbon fixed in photosynthesis. In this issue of Plant, Cell & Environment, Kölling et al. (2015) report on an extensive set of measurements of partitioning in wild type plants, plants defective in starch metabolism, and plants with altered circadian clock genes. The paper is an outgrowth of an earlier one in which many of the methods are described and tested (Kölling et al. 2013).