The people behind the papers - Emily Lo and Keiko Torii

The patterning of stomata - the pores in the plant epidermis that facilitate gas exchange and water control - is regulated by a family of small secreted peptides. A new paper in Development analyses the effective ranges of two such peptides, borrowing a statistical technique used by astrophysicists to investigate the distribution and patterning of galaxies. We caught up with authors Emily Lo, who worked on the project when an undergraduate at the University of Washington (UW), and her supervisor Keiko Torii, who recently moved her lab from UW to The University of Texas at Austin (where she is Professor and Johnson & Johnson Centennial Chair in Plant Cell Biology), to hear more about the story.