ArticlePlant physiology2025
Stem water potential measurements obtained using standard methodologies diverge under extreme drought in tomato and grapevine.
Article in Plant physiology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Don't add pressure to stress: Measured water potentials differ by method under severe drought.Plant physiology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Stem water potential (ψstem) is one of the most common metrics used to define plant water status. Accurate measurement of ψstem is therefore essential to quantify critical plant physiological processes in response to water availability. In theory, leaf and stem water potential equilibrate when leaf transpiration is prevented, and leaves and stems are hydraulically connected. Therefore, many studies quantify ψstem by measuring equilibrated leaves with a pressure chamber. However, leaf tissue damage occurring during dehydration due to xylem cavitation events may impact the accuracy of this indirect measurement of ψstem. Here, we present 2 case-studies in which ψstem close to the lethal threshold for leaf mesophyll tissue led to high discrepancies between pressure chamber measurements of equilibrated leaves and direct psychrometric measurements. We dehydrated (i) whole plants of an herbaceous species, tomato, under typical diurnal cycles in a glasshouse, and (ii) branches of a woody species, grapevine, under laboratory conditions. Dehydration beyond the point of xylem cavitation is expected to lead to leaf water potential falling below ψstem, but rather we observed that once ψstem declined to values expected to cause considerable loss of leaf xylem function, indirect ψstem values from leaves (ψleaf-eq) remained higher than direct ψstem measured with psychrometers (ψstem-PSY). A decline in the osmotic potential of the leaf xylem sap (ψπ-sap) was consistent in both species, possibly indicating that the contents of disrupted leaf cells contributed to this decline. These results demonstrate that, at least for tomato and grapevine species, caution should be exercised when using the pressure chamber at water potential levels that may induce leaf tissue damage and support a method for approximating these levels by leaf xylem sap extraction.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.