Remote sensing has become an essential tool in phenotyping and precision agriculture to minimise the impact of cultural management on environment and human health. Several imaging techniques are currently in use for the detection of plant stress, but the information generated requires of increasingly advanced mathematical tools. Multicolour fluorescence imaging appears as a promising tool as data provider to feed mathematical models classifying healthy and infected zucchini plants.

An increased CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere improves yield of the horticultural crops but its efficiency is reduced after long-term exposure. We studied the evolution of the sweet pepper crop response to CO₂ enrichment in Mediterranean greenhouse conditions under different salinity levels. The study revealed the crop phase when high CO₂ concentration acclimation occurs and, thus, the point when removal of the CO₂ supply could improve its efficiency.

Unlike other species, tomato plants need to ‘sleep’ 8 h a day to remain healthy; that is, continuous light injures tomatoes. We experimentally tested many proposed explanations for this enigma and discarded all but one, which suggest that the presence of a light – normally a ‘day’ signal – when the internal circadian clock indicates ‘it’s night-time’ is central to this disorder: we call this conflict ‘circadian asynchrony’. These findings help in understanding the complex co-ordination between metabolism, light and time.

Climate change will shift the adaptive regions of most forage grasses. We investigated the responses of two tall fescue genotypes and one perennial ryegrass to increasing drought and found that at the physiological and metabolic levels drought was imposed more slowly in tall fescue. Tall fescue may fit into future demands for forage grasses due to its good drought resistance.

The quantitation of plant hormones by LC-MS remains challenging because they belong to different chemical classes with contrasted analytical imperatives, and matrix effects often compromise reliable measurements. Here we present a technique based on accurate-mass LC-MS taking advantage of matrix elimination by solid phase extraction before analysis. This method is applied to Arabidopsis samples and as expected, shows that abscisic acid is accumulated under drought and that mutants affected in aspartate oxidase have an increased content in salicylate.

Pyrabactin resistance-like (PYL) proteins were identified as receptors of the plant hormone ABA, but the functions of many PYLs remains to be elucidated. In this work, we determined that rice OsPYL8 and OsPYL9 are specifically expressed in the endosperms. Analyses of transgenic rice plants overexpressing OsPYL8 or OsPYL9 further showed that the two OsPYLs function as positive regulators of ABA signaling pathway in rice seed germination.

Although Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) has been well studied in the family Bromeliaceae, the relationship between CAM activity and vacuolar organic-acid transport at night has not. We investigated ATP- and PPi-dependent proton transport in the tonoplast membrane vesicles of seven bromeliad species. We found that tonoplast ATP-driven H+ activity is greater than tonoplast PPi. Our results demonstrate a close correlation between CAM rhythm and the intrinsic properties of vacuolar membranes.