Already a proven mechanism for drought resilience, crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) is a specialized type of photosynthesis that maximizes water-use efficiency by means of an inverse (compared to C 3 and C 4 photosynthesis) day/ night pattern of stomatal closure/opening to shift CO 2 uptake to the night, when evapotranspiration rates are low. A systems-level understanding of temporal molecular and metabolic controls is needed to define the cellular behaviour underpinning CAM. Here, we report high-resolution temporal behaviours of transcript, protein and metabolite abundances across a CAM diel cycle and, where applicable, compare the observations to the well-established C 3 model plant Arabidopsis. A mechanistic finding that emerged is that CAM operates with a diel redox poise that is shifted relative to that in Arabidopsis. Moreover, we identify widespread rescheduled expression of genes associated with signal transduction mechanisms that regulate stomatal opening/closing. Controlled production and degradation of transcripts and proteins represents a timing mechanism by which to regulate cellular function, yet knowledge of how this molecular timekeeping regulates CAM is unknown. Here, we provide new insights into complex post-transcriptional and -translational hierarchies that govern CAM in Agave. These data sets provide a resource to inform efforts to engineer more efficient CAM traits into economically valuable C 3 crops.T he water-use efficiency of Agave spp. hinges on crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), a specialized mode of photosynthesis that evolved from ancestral C 3 photosynthesis in response to water and CO 2 limitation 1 and is found in ∼6.5% of higher plants. Whereas C 3 photosynthesis produces a three-carbon (3-C) molecule for carbon fixation during the day, CAM generates a four-carbon organic acid from carbon fixation at night. In CAM, this nocturnal carboxylation reaction is catalysed by phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPC), and the 3-C substrate phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) is supplied by the glycolytic breakdown of carbohydrate formed during the previous day. The nocturnally accumulated malic acid is stored overnight in a central vacuole, and during the subsequent day malate is decarboxylated to release CO 2 at an elevated concentration for Rubisco in the chloroplast. The diel separation of carboxylases in CAM is accompanied by an inverse (compared with C 3 and C 4 photosynthesis-performing species) day/night pattern of stomatal closure/ opening that results in improved water-use efficiency (CO 2 fixed per unit water lost) that is up to sixfold higher than that of C 3 photosynthesis plants and up to threefold higher than that of C 4 photosynthesis plants under comparable conditions 2 .The frequent emergence of CAM from C 3 photosynthesis throughout evolutionary history implies that all of the enzymes required for CAM are homologues of ancestral forms found in C 3 species 1,3 . As such, the CAM pathway has been identified as a target for synthetic biology because it offers the potential to engin...