Plants' ability to sense light and temperature, and their ability to adapt to climate change, hinges on free-forming structures in their cells whose function was, until now, a mystery. Researchers have now determined how these structures work on a molecular level, as well as where and how they form.
"At one time, people called these photobodies 'garbage cans,' because they didn't understand them. When people don't understand something, they call it useless. But they aren't useless at all," said UCR botany professor Meng Chen, senior author of both papers."They are a new frontier in science." His laboratory identified a gene that made it impossible for the membrane-less organelles to assemble. Knocking out this gene made the plants partially blind to light."We saw that these organelles are involved in light sensing, but we realized this was a correlation, not causation," Chen said.
The group theorized that temperature-sensitivity would be a function of where in the cell the organelles formed. Other researchers proposed that the formation of the organelles is random, but Chen suspected this was not the case.
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