A Unified Survival-Based Energy Framework for Plant Color Stability and Productivity

Plant coloration, expressed through leaf greenness, floral pigmentation, and fruit color intensity, reflects the integrated outcome of pigment biosynthesis, optical absorption, metabolic regulation, and energy–mass exchange with the environment. While the biochemical pathways governing the synthesis and degradation of major pigment classes—including chlorophylls, carotenoids, and anthocyanins—are well established, existing models largely interpret color expression as a localized biochemical phenomenon. Such approaches do not explicitly account for whole-plant energy balance, transpiration-driven losses, or thermodynamic constraints, limiting their ability to explain widely observed patterns of color saturation, stress-induced fading, and species-specific stability across environmental gradients.

Here we develop a unified framework for plant color generation and stability that treats pigmentation as a survival-limited energetic process embedded within the broader dynamics of absorption, transport, metabolism, and entropy production. Central to the framework is a dimensionless energy survival factor,

Ψ=AE/TE+ε

where AE represents absorbed and retained energetic and elemental resources relevant to pigment formation, TE denotes transpiration-linked, metabolic, and environmental dissipation losses, and ε captures irreducible entropy-producing degradation inherent to non-equilibrium biological systems. By construction, 0<Ψ<1, ensuring full compliance with the second law of thermodynamics.

When combined with pigment-specific optical absorption coefficients and physiological limitation functions, the framework yields a physically interpretable description of both pigment concentration and color stability. Empirical ranges for absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (≈45–70%), excitation survival (≈85–95%), and respiratory and transpiration losses (≈30–60% of assimilated resources) naturally constrain Ψ, predicting observed limits on sustained pigment accumulation without invoking biochemical inefficiency or ad hoc correction factors.

The analysis demonstrates that increased light availability or enhanced biosynthetic capacity alone does not intensify coloration unless absorbed resources survive transport and loss processes. Stress-induced chlorosis, transient anthocyanin accumulation, and saturation of greenness under high irradiance emerge as direct consequences of reduced energy survival rather than impaired pigment synthesis. By explicitly separating survival from synthesis, the framework reconciles molecular-scale pigment biochemistry with whole-plant and ecosystem-scale color dynamics.

This survival-based formulation provides a unified physical basis for interpreting plant color variation across species and environments and offers a scalable foundation for crop stress diagnostics, remote-sensing interpretation, and comparative plant phenotyping. More broadly, it extends survival-limited energy principles to visible plant traits, advancing plant science beyond isolated biochemical descriptions toward a systems-level understanding of how energy governs phenotypic expression.

Please check the attachment for details