SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 3 - 5 may 2006

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Professor Susanne von Caemmerer
Professor, Molecular Plant Physiology Group, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra

Susanne von Caemmerer was born and grew up in Freiburg, West Germany. She moved to Australia in 1973 to commence studies at the Australian National University (ANU). There she completed undergraduate studies in pure mathematics in 1976 followed by a PhD in plant physiology in 1981. She is now Professor of Molecular Plant Physiology at the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU. Her research focuses on photosynthesis, with an emphasis on the mathematical modeling of the carbon acquisition of plants, the biochemistry of carbon dioxide fixation and the regulation of carbon dioxide diffusion in leaves.

Relating chloroplast biochemistry to gas exchange of leaves: Insights from transgenic plants

Photosynthetic processes of leaves have a remarkable influence on Earth’s atmosphere but are also affected by changes in ambient CO₂ concentrations. Understanding gas exchange processes at the leaf level is therefore important in the context of global climate change. Mathematical models of leaf photosynthesis provide a mechanistic basis for predicting and assessing changes in photosynthetic CO₂ fixation in different environments and provide a means of scaling predictions from leaves to canopies and regions. Components of the photosynthetic apparatus are finely balanced and environmental perturbations frequently result in parallel variations in many of the components. This makes it difficult to distinguish between causal and correlative links. We have used molecular techniques to disturb these correlative links by generating transgenic plants where the photosynthetic metabolism has been impaired with RNA antisense constructs to various photosynthetic proteins. This approach produces plants with a range of reductions in the amounts of specific proteins involved in photosynthesis, making this approach ideally suited to a quantitative analysis of photosynthetic processes.