All roads lead to the vacuole Three diversified vacuolar trafficking pathways in plants
The plant vacuole is an organelle that, similar to the yeast vacuole or the animal lysosome, has the function of degrading unwanted materials. In contrast to yeast vacuoles and animal lysosomes, the plant vacuole also has the agriculturally-important role of storing nutrients including proteins and sugars. This function of the plant vacuole depends on the correct transport of and activities of proteins in the vacuole. However, it was not known how plants were able to transport multiple types of proteins to vacuoles.
Associate Professor Takashi Ueda and Project Researcher Kazuo Ebine’s research group at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Science used Arabidopsis thaliana to examine the mechanism by which proteins were transported to plant vacuoles. The group found that, in addition to the route shared with other organisms, plants have at least two other routes for transporting proteins to vacuoles.
From this result, the research group concluded that plants, by having evolved a vacuolar transport system far more complicated than that of animals, were able to develop vacuoles with diverse and complicated functions. Optimizing and strengthening the protein functions and the storage capacity of plant vacuoles may lead to the development of functionally improved plants.
Press release (Japanese)
Paper
Kazuo Ebine, Takeshi Inoue, Jun Ito, Emi Ito, Tomohiro Uemura, Tatsuaki Goh, Hiroshi Abe, Ken Sato, Akihiko Nakano, and Takashi Ueda,
“Plant vacuolar trafficking occurs through distinctly regulated pathways”,
Current Biology Online Edition: 2014/5/29, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.004.
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Links
Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science