Mutant Series: OPEN ALL NIGHT LONG (OPAL)

OPEN ALL NIGHT LONG. It sounds like a coffee shop or bar or club or karaoke, something like that. Interesting enough, it's a name of one Arabidopsis thaliana mutant. 

Plants have an economic life as like as most other biological systems. It makes its own food using water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. The process knows as photosynthesis. At the day time, it opens its gate/stomata. In the daytime, light is available and perfect time for cooking/photosynthesis for them. In the night, they just close the door/stomata to prevent water loss through transpiration. So, for plants, the following things happen generally in the case of stomata opening and closure. 


Nighttime stomatal control is important from both evolutionary and ecological perspective. But, the mechanism is not clear whether this dark response is simply a passive consequence of the absence of light stimulus, or an active process recruiting other mechanisms of stomatal closure or involving independent signaling events 

"The biology of nocturnal closure is obscure"
Francis Darwin  

From the mutant screening of Arabidopsis thaliana, based on impaired leaf transpiration on dark condition/night time simulation, identified five mutants that maintain stomata open the whole night. According to their this property, it was named OPEN ALL NIGHT LONG (OPAL).   

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