Tiny highways in leaves could lead to more productive crops
Scientists at the Australian Research Council (ARC) ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP) have found that some plants have ten times more communication channels inside their leaves than other plants, which they think is a crucial factor in determining photosynthetic efficiency.
These highways, called plasmodesmata, are microscopic structures that pass through plant cell walls. They are so small that it is possible to fit more than 25,000 plasmodesmata in the diameter of a human hair.
“Plasmodesmata transport small molecules or metabolites, such as sugar molecules, in the same way roads transport cars. Just like in a city, having more roads means that cars can travel faster, while less roads result in traffic jams,” said The Australian National University (ANU) PhD student Florence Danila, whose project at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, has resulted in these findings.
“We found that plants that are able to produce more food, like corn, have ten times more plasmodesmata than less efficient plants, and that they have a very special role allowing the flux of metabolites” she said.
Two biochemical pathway processes, C3 and C4 photosynthesis, are used by plants to fix carbon using sunlight. Food crops that use C4 photosynthesis include maize and sorghum, while rice and wheat use the less efficient and ancient C3 pathway.
“Our findings are ground-breaking and extremely exciting because this is the first systematic comparison of plasmodesmata in an extensive number of C3 and C4 species, including some of the most important food crops such as wheat, sorghum and rice,“ said ANU Professor Susanne von Caemmerer, Deputy Director at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis and one of the authors of this study.
“This is a very important set of data for projects that aim to engineer the C4 photosynthesis pathway into C3 crops, but it is also very important for crop modelling and to help unravel one of the unsolved mysteries of plant evolution; why and how some plants evolved the more efficient C4 photosynthesis pathway,” said ANU Professor Robert Furbank, CoETP Director.
This work was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
Media issued by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis.
Tiny highways in leaves could lead to more productive crops | Australian Research Council