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Abstract
Much of the 70% of global water usage associated with agriculture passes through stomatal pores of plant leaves. The guard cells, which regulate these pores, thus have a profound influence on photosynthetic carbon assimilation and water use efficiency of plants. We recently demonstrated how quantitative mathematical modeling of guard cells with the OnGuard modeling software yields detail sufficient to guide phenotypic and mutational analysis. This advance represents an all-important step toward applications in directing “reverse-engineering” of guard cell function for improved water use efficiency and carbon assimilation. OnGuard is nonetheless challenging for those unfamiliar with a modeler’s way of thinking. In practice, each model construct represents a hypothesis under test, to be discarded, validated or refined by comparisons between model predictions and experimental results. The few guidelines set out here summarize the standard and logical starting points for users of the OnGuard software.
Acknowledgments
This work and the associated publications were supported by BBSRC grants BB/H024867/1, BB/F001630/1 and BB/H009817/1 to M.R.B., by a Chinese Scholarship Council and Glasgow University PhD scholarship to Y.W. and by a Begonia Trust Scholarship to M.P.
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.