Sugars as Signal Molecules in Plant Seed Development
-
U. Wobus
Abstract
Higher plants as sessile organisms react very flexible to environmental changes and stresses and use metabolites like glucose, sucrose and nitrate not only as nutrients but also as signals as part of their life strategies. The role of metabolites as signal molecules has attracted considerable interest during recent years. Data reviewed here for developing plant seeds suggest a trigger function of especially sugars also in development in that metabolic regulatory control can override developmental regulation, i.e., the developmental programme only continues normally if a certain metabolic state is sensed at a given time point in a given cell or tissue.
Several experimental strategies have provided mainly correlative evidence that certain sugar levels and/or the resulting changes in osmotic values are necessary within defined tissues or cells to maintain a distinct stage of differentiation or to proceed with the developmental programme. In young legume seeds, but certainly also in other tissues, a high hexose (probably mainly glucose) level seems to maintain the capacity of cells to divide whereas—later in seed development—a certain sucrose level is necessary to induce storage-associated cell differentiation. A major determinant of embryo hexose levels in young legume seeds is an apoplastic invertase preferentially expressed in the inner cell layers of the seed coat. The enzyme cleaves the incoming photoassimilate sucrose into glucose and fructose. During development the tissue harbouring the invertase is degraded in a very specific spatial and temporal pattern as part of the developmental programme and is thus creating steep glucose gradients within the cotyledons. These gradients can be measured at nearly cellular resolution and were found to be correlated positively with cell division rate and negatively with cell differentiation and storage activities. A hexose and a sucrose transporter accumulating only in the epidermal cell layer of the cotyledons seem to be essential in creating and maintaining these gradients.
To gain further insights into the role of metabolites, especially sugars, as triggers of developmental processes we foremost have to identify receptor molecules already characterised in yeast, and to describe and understand the signal transduction networks involved.
Copyright © 1999 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
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Articles in the same Issue
- Paul Nurse Felix Hoppe-Seyler Lecturer 1999
- Cyclin Dependent Kinases and Regulation of the Fission Yeast Cell Cycle
- Paper of the Year 1998
- Autonomous Regulation in Mammalian Mitochondrial DNA Transcription
- Prospects for the Precise Engineering of Plant Genomes by Homologous Recombination
- The Glycosphingolipidoses from Disease to Basic Principles of Metabolism
- The Dual Role of Lipopolysaccharide as Effector and Target Molecule
- A Unified Mechanism of Enzymatic Synthesis of Two Calcium Messengers: Cyclic ADP-Ribose and NAADP
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- Molecular Farming of Recombinant Antibodies in Plants
- Chimeric Restriction Enzymes: What Is Next?
- Viroids with Hammerhead Ribozymes: Some Unique Structural and Functional Aspects with Respect to Other Members of the Group
- Mutagenesis via Insertional or Restriction Enzyme-Mediated Integration (REMI) as a Tool to Tag Pathogenicity Related Genes in Plant Pathogenic Fungi
- Role of Mitochondria in Parkinson Disease
- Mitochondria Harbouring Mutant mtDNA a Cuckoo in the Nest?
- Mutant p53: Gain-of-Function Oncoproteins and Wild-Type p53 Inactivators
- The Role of Chemokines in Cutaneous Allergic Inflammation
- Mutations of Calcium Channel beta Subunit Genes in Mice
- Agonist-Stimulated Pathways of Calcium Signaling in Pancreatic Acinar Cells
- Some of the Early Events Underlying Th2. Cell Maturation and Susceptibility to Leishmania major Infection in BALB/c Mice
- Universal and Unique Features of Kinesin Motors: Insights from a Comparison of Fungal and Animal Conventional Kinesins
- Elementary Steps in Protein Folding
- Molecular Reaction Mechanisms of Proteins Monitored by Time-Resolved FTIR-Spectroscopy
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- Diphosphoinositol Polyphosphates: The Final Frontier for Inositide Research?
- A Role of Poly (ADP-Ribose) Polymerase in NF- B Transcriptional Activation
- Processing of Artificial Peptide-DNA-Conjugates by the Mitochondrial Intermediate Peptidase (MIP)
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- Functional Characterisation of Dictyostelium Myosin II with Conserved Tryptophanyl Residue 501 Mutated to Tyrosine
- Mitochondrial Nitric Oxide Synthase Regulates Mitochondrial Matrix pH
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