Author Spotlight: Advancing Stomatal Research with Automated Aperture Measurement

Plantal stomata play central roles in adaptation to stress conditions, so we need to measure stomata aperture to understand how plants respond to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, stomata aperture measurement is time-consuming and cumbersome. To measure stomata aperture, we peel the epidermis and observe stomata under a microscope.

Then we manually measure stomata aperture, which takes a long time even for very experienced researchers. We challenged these barriers and developed a tool and a technique that can automatically measure stomata aperture in intact Arabidopsis leaves. So we strongly believe that stomata measuring device and deep-learning algorithm that we developed will facilitate functional analysis of stomata responses to various biotic and abiotic stresses because these technical advances significantly reduce time and human labor required for stomata aperture measurement.