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Matthew J. Germino, A carbohydrate quandary, Tree Physiology, Volume 35, Issue 11, November 2015, Pages 1141–1145, https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpv109
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‘Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.’—Isaac Asimov
Carbon (C) is central to the flow and storage of mass and energy in plants and their ecosystems, but our understanding of C dynamics in plants is still developing. Trees and many plants have ∼50% C (45–60% of the dry mass, Thomas and Martin 2012), and a large portion of this C is in the form of carbohydrates, one of the four main macromolecules comprising plants. Carbohydrates are traditionally classified as either recalcitrant, ‘structural’ components of cell walls and other tissues, or as labile, ‘non-structural’ pools, although this dichotomy is often not so clear (Hoch 2007). Non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) can comprise a large portion of a tree's C and the dry mass (up to ∼50 and ∼25%, respectively, e.g., Hoch et al. 2003), but they can also be scarce due to tight linkages of NSC to C uptake, NSC utilization and active regulation of pools.
