How plans sense endoplasmic reticulum stress in their root?

August 22, 2024

The key factor could open the door for developing Heat and Salinity resistant crops

An international collaborative research team, including members from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Academia Sinica, the University of Tokyo have identified a crucial factor required for plant cells' roots to respond to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. This finding is expected to provide significant insights for developing crop production technologies that can withstand rising temperatures and salinity, both of which are known to induce ER stress.

Plants cannot move freely. So, they have evolved various stress response mechanisms to survive in harsh environments. For example, when exposed to high temperatures or high salinity, plants experience stress in the endoplasmic reticulum, leading to abnormalities such as the improper folding of synthesized proteins. However, many aspects of how ER stress is sensed in plants remain unclear.

In this study, the international collaborative research team discovered that plants lacking an enzyme called nonspecific phospholipase C3 (NPC3) exhibited a significantly reduced sensitivity to ER stress. This finding shed light on the molecular mechanisms involved in plants' ability to sense ER stress and is expected to contribute to the development of crops that are more resilient to environmental changes.

Original article

Journal of Experimental Botany doi: 10.1093/jxb/erae303

A. H. Ngo, A. Angkawijaya, Y. Nakamura, K. Kanehara,

"Non-specific phospholipase C3 is involved in endoplasmic reticulum stress tolerance in Arabidopsis".

Contact

Yuki Nakamura; Team Leader
Anh H Ngo; Visiting Scientist
Plant Lipid Research Team Team