Explore the latest insights from top science journals in the Muser Press daily roundup (September 8, 2025), featuring impactful research on climate change challenges.
In brief:
A ‘wasteful’ plant process makes a key prenatal vitamin: Climate change may reduce it
New research from Michigan State University reveals that photorespiration – long considered a wasteful process – is essential for producing a crucial nutrient for preventing birth defects.
For the first time, scientists have measured how much carbon flows through photorespiration to make folates, a class of compounds that includes vitamin B9 – known for its importance as a prenatal vitamin. According to the study, led by MSU researcher Berkley Walker, about 6 percent of the carbon absorbed by plants is used to make folates. That number plummets by fivefold when photorespiration is suppressed.
These findings, published in Nature Plants, could help scientists engineer plants to boost production of the nutrient important for human health. They also shed light on how a high-carbon dioxide world caused by climate change could make plants less nutritious.
“In cultures where the bulk of their calories come from rice, it’s a pretty big deal if that rice is less nutritious,” said Walker, an associate professor in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory and the Department of Plant Biology. “The way plants respond to changing climates is complicated. Understanding how they might adapt can help us plan better for the future.”
Plants are like factories, using the raw materials of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, or CO₂, to make sugar they use for food. The foreman of this factory is an enzyme called rubisco, which grabs CO₂ and feeds it into the production line.
But sometimes, rubisco gets sloppy on the job and accidentally grabs oxygen, clogging up the assembly line and producing a toxic byproduct called phosphoglycolate. That’s when a recycling crew springs into action. In a process called photorespiration, plants neutralize the toxic waste and salvage it into useful compounds.
Scientists have long suspected that photorespiration supported processes like making folates. Until now, it was unclear how much carbon photorespiration contributed to making that vitamin.
To crunch the numbers, Walker and his lab tested a common model plant, called Arabidopsis thaliana. They measured the plant under conditions with or without photorespiration and measured how much CO₂ the plant took in by clamping its leaves in an infrared gas analyzer. Then, they sprayed the leaves with liquid nitrogen while still clamped to freeze them immediately. This helped them understand what the leaf was doing while being measured.
Walker’s team used mass spectrometry to examine the leaf’s chemicals and how they incorporated CO₂ over time. Then, they repeated the process for several months, measuring chemical content at different points before plugging the measurements into a computational analysis.
The results provide a stark look at how plant nutrition could change. As the CO₂ in the air increases, plants need photorespiration less often. MSU’s study found that in those circumstances, the carbon flow to produce vitamin B9 dropped from nearly 6 percent to about 1 percent. That’s significant, as vitamin B9 is important during pregnancy to reduce the risk of neural tube defects.
“Understanding how nature makes this vitamin will help us engineer plants fortified with this nutrient,” Walker said. “That may become necessary especially in cultures where people can’t simply take a multivitamin to make up for less nutritious plants.”
The Walker lab’s next step is conducting similar experiments with crop plants grown outdoors. They want to know whether the same trends inside the lab are true for plants grown out in the field.
The National Science Foundation-funded project is another example of critical research that lays the foundation for the future.
“We need this knowledge about plants in order to engineer them for the future,” Walker said. “If we don’t have that foundation, we’ll never to get to the application.”
Journal Reference:
Gashu, K., Kaste, J.A.M., Roje, S. et al., ‘Metabolic flux analysis in leaf metabolism quantifies the link between photorespiration and one carbon metabolism’, Nature Plants (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41477-025-02091-w
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Bethany Mauger | Michigan State University (MSU)
Desert soils emit greenhouse gases in minutes – even without live microbes
A groundbreaking study from researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev reveals that desert soils can emit powerful greenhouse gases within minutes of being wetted – even in the absence of microbial life.
Published by Dr. Isaac Yagle and Prof. Ilya Gelfand at BGU’s Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in Scientific Reports, the study challenges long-standing assumptions that soil microbes are solely responsible for post-rain “pulse emissions” of gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and nitric oxide (NO). These gas bursts – common in drylands after rainfall – are known to contribute significantly to atmospheric warming and pollution.
Using laboratory experiments, the team compared emissions from natural and sterilized desert soils collected near the Dead Sea. The sterilization, achieved through high-dose gamma irradiation, eliminated most living organisms from the soil. Yet, even without live microbes, the sterilized soils released large quantities of N₂O and NO immediately after wetting – up to 13 times more NO and 5 times more N₂O than the live soils.
“Our results show that chemical reactions – not just biology – drive these immediate emissions, especially for nitrogen-based gases,” said Dr. Yagle. “This changes how we understand and model greenhouse gas emissions from soils in drylands.”
While CO₂ emissions remained higher in live soils due to microbial respiration, a substantial portion was still generated through non-biological processes, such as reactions involving soil carbonates and physical gas release.
These findings are particularly important as drylands expand globally due to climate change. With increasingly erratic rainfall patterns, the frequency of soil wetting and drying cycles is rising – potentially increasing the contribution of these abiotic emissions to the global greenhouse gas budget.
“Our work highlights the need to factor in abiotic processes when assessing the environmental impact of dryland soils,” added Prof. Gelfand. “Ignoring them may lead to underestimation of regional and global emissions.”
Journal Reference:
Yagle, I., Gelfand, I., ‘Abiotic reactions drive post-wetting soil emissions of N₂O and NO and contribute partially to CO₂ emissions’, Scientific Reports 15, 27818 (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-12362-3
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU)
Can clownfish adapt to rising sea temperatures?
In the next 75 years, surface sea temperatures may rise by up to 4°C, with increasingly frequent short-term marine heatwaves also predicted. This could cause significant damage to our essential marine ecosystems, for example with corals widely known to be vulnerable to bleaching. But how will fish fare in these changing climates?
In iScience, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) describe the metabolic and molecular changes that can support young clownfish to adapt to climate change and warming seas. Through genomic and transcriptomic studies across multiple tissues within young clownfish, the team identified the biological processes affected by rising water temperatures. And the outlook is more positive than we may have thought.
By exposing freshly hatched juvenile Amphiprion ocellaris (Common clownfish) to a raised water temperature (31°C) over the course of two months, the researchers could monitor the changes in gene expression and physiology of the fish. They found the most significant change was on the liver and pancreas, where insulin secretion reduced and oxidative phosphorylation increased in fish living long-term in 31°C water. These changes may reduce the impact of heat stress among fish.
Metabolic rates increased only from acute temperature stress (1-day exposure to 31°C followed by cooling to normal summer temperatures of 28°C), but not to chronic, long-term exposure to 31°C. Additionally, the earlier that the fish were exposed to these higher temperatures, the less the effect on metabolism, and the better the fish could acclimatize to warmer waters.
“Whilst we’ve found mechanisms for heat acclimation, these biological changes may have other long-term negative impacts on fish health, so we need to expand our studies and do further testing to get a better idea on the future of our fish,” comments Professor Timothy Ravasi, head of the Marine Climate Change Unit at OIST and author on this paper. “But knowing that developmental exposure to these high temperatures can support heat acclimation, we can move forward with hope for the future of our tropical fish.”
Journal Reference:
Billy Moore, Shannon McMahon, Michael Izumiyama, Taewoo Ryu, Timothy Ravasi, ‘Ocean warming drives tissue-wide metabolic reprogramming in a fish’, iScience 28, 9: 113395 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113395
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University
“Major floods and droughts every 15 years”… AI forecasts a crisis
A new study led by Professor Jonghun Kam‘s team at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) has uncovered a shocking forecast for Pakistan‘s future. Using a cutting-edge AI model, the research predicts that the country will face unprecedented “super floods” and “extreme droughts” on a periodic basis. This dire prediction is a direct result of accelerating global warming, which is causing more frequent and severe extreme weather events around the world, particularly in vulnerable high-altitude regions where glacies are melting.
The team focused on Pakistan because its major rivers, like the Indus, are the country’s lifeline, but climate change has made water resources management increasingly difficult. As a Global South nation, Pakistan is especially vulnerable to climate change and lacks the economic and technological infrastructure to conduct extensive research.
AI tackles inaccurate climate models
To overcome these challenges, Professor Kam’s team turned to artificial intelligence. Traditional climate models often struggle with complex terrains like Pakistan’s steep mountains and narrow valleys. They tend to underestimate changes in these areas or overestimate rainfall, which makes their predictions unreliable.
The researchers trained several AI models by comparing past river flow data with actual observations, which dramatically improved the accuracy of their predictions for past extreme weather events. This AI-corrected data proved to be far more reliable than existing models.
What does the AI forecast?
The analysis revealed a disturbing pattern. The upper Indus River could experience major floods and severe droughts approximately every 15 years. Surrounding rivers could face the same extreme events even more frequently, roughly every 11 years. This projection is a clear call to action, urging the Pakistani government to adopt tailored water management strategies for each river basin instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.
Professor Kam stated that this new AI technology will be crucial for producing reliable climate data not only for Pakistan but also for other climate-vulnerable and data-poor regions around the globe.
This research was conducted by the team of Professor Jonghun Kam from POSTECH’s Division of Environmental Science and Engineering and doctoral student Hassan Raza, in collaboration with Professor Dagang Wang’s team from Sun Yat-sen University in China. The study was published in the international academic journal Environmental Research Letters, and was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Individual Basic Research Program and the BK21 FOUR Program. Hassan Raza received support from the ‘Global Korean Scholarship’.
Journal Reference:
Hassan Raza, Dagang Wang and Jonghun Kam, ‘More record events in streamflow over Pakistan revealed by observation-constrained projections’, Environmental Research Letters 20, 8: 084079 (2025). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/adf130
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH)
Featured image credit: Gerd Altmann | Pixabay
