The authors used a bottom‑up thermodynamic modelling framework to investigate how plants decode calcium signals, starting from Ca2+ binding to EF‑hand proteins and extending to higher‑order decoding modules. They identified six universal Ca2+-decoding modules that can explain variations in calcium sensitivity among kinases and provide a theoretical basis for interpreting calcium signal amplitude and frequency in plant cells.

The study applied a novel Stomatal Patterning Phenotype (SPP) spatial analysis to high‑throughput phenotyping data from 180 maize recombinant inbred lines, dissecting stomatal density into component traits related to cell size, packing, and positional probabilities. Using these derived traits, the authors built a structural equation model that explained 74% of stomatal density variation and identified specific quantitative trait loci for lateral and longitudinal stomatal patterning.