A major row has broken out about whether plants emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.The startling claim that trees could be responsible for putting millions of tonnes of methane into the atmosphere every year was published last year in the prestigious journal Nature. But that has now been rubbished by rival researchers who report that plants emit virtually no methane whatsoever.

Tom Dueck, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, says his team’s independent investigations are the first published results to show that plants’ methane emissions are negligible or zero. That means their contribution to the global methane budget, and potentially to climate change, simply isn’t worth worrying about.

But Frank Keppler, now at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, Germany - whose team announced in January 2006 they had detected methane exhaled from living plants - is sticking to his guns. ‘I am one hundred per cent confident that plants emit methane’, he told Chemistry World, insisting that as yet unpublished research would confirm his findings once and for all.

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