Stoma and Stomata

I too was very scared when my doctor said „You, dear sir need a stoma surgery ” …. YES my heart started being like hell. And believe me I’m not that easy to scare. But soon I realized that this came from the fact that I just didn’t know what that meant, so I started my research on that.

I must tell you by now that stoma refers to a small hole or opening which got the name from the stomata in botany. If you are interested in the surgical or medical stoma please bare with me a little as i will talk about it in my next post. Now I’ll just try to offer to you as many details I’ve come to know about stomata, where the name came from and other aspects I found interesting in my research.

Stoma (or stomate, pl “stomata”) is a small opening that helps plants make their gas exchange. Plants breath in CO2( carbon dioxide) and breaths out O2 (oxigen ) and that’s why they are so important because they help to keep the air clean and us humans healthy. This gas exchange is needed for the process of photosynthesis. There is another role of these pores called stomata: through them the plant releases water in water vapors. This process is called transpiration.

Another interesting fact is that stomata can be found on both sides of the leaf. Dicotyledons plants have stomata on the lower epidermis and monocotyledons on the upper epidermis. More interesting is that on plants that have submerged leaves stoma is missing and on floating leaves stomata are present only on the upper side. Also there are plants that open their stomata only at night and plants that open stomata at day, excited by factors like carbon dioxide concentration, light and of course, humidity. I’ve read somewhere that scientists

even don’t know for sure how this mechanism surely and clearly works, they just found out what factors stomata reacts to.

Stomata is in fact a very reliable and “safe” working mechanism. It was discovered that stomata can react to pathogens and close itself without letting them in and getting the plants sick. Doctors and scientists, as they usually do, find very reliable working mechanisms in nature and duplicate them in the interest of curing diseases.

STOMA reacts to pathogens preventing them from sickening the plans, it being a very small hole which permits change of gases or different fluids safely. So they copied these small but “smart” nature schematics to make a stoma which then is used in curing some very unhappy patients LIKE I WAS.