PLANT PHYSIOLOGY IN THE U.S.S.R*

Abstract

OUTSIDE the Institute of Plant Physiology re-search is going on in many other plant physiology laboratories. There is an independent laboratory of photosynthesis in the Academy, under Academician A. A. Richter. The laboratory has four workers: Richter, who is seventy-four ; and three others, including K. T. Sukorukov. Richter's wife, who is well known under her own name of T. A. Krass-nocelskaya, has the chair of plant physiology at the Pedagogical Institute in Moscow. In this laboratory photosynthesis is measured from disks of leaves in a Warburg apparatus. Recently^27.28 Richter and his co-workers have surveyed the relationship between photosynthesis and growths in some dozen different plants. They find that over long periods the photo-synthetic rate remains unchanged, despite changing growth-rate and accumulation of dry matter ; and it is independent of polyploidy, nitrogen-level, and length of day. These results are not simply the consequence of the controlling action of carbon dioxide under natural conditions, for in some experiments the carbon dioxide level was as high as 0-2 per cent. Richter has also surveyed the photosynthetic rates of plants of very different taxonomic positions (for example, Ginkgo, ferns), and he reports some large differences among them. Other lines of work in this laboratory are plastid chemistry and the physiology of immunity.