A new study has found that plants have a metabolic signal responsible for regulating their biological clocks and ensuring that they store enough energy to get through the night each day after the sun goes down, closely related to their growth balance.
Mike Haydon, a graduate of the University of York’s Department of Biology, said, “We think this metabolic signal acts like setting an alarm clock at bedtime to ensure the plant’s survival. Plants must coordinate photosynthesis with the metabolism of their daily environment and with the amount of carbon available to regulate their biological clock and growth mechanisms.”
This metabolic signaling provides important information for plant growth, such as the amount of sugar available to the plant by dusk, sustaining the plant’s consumption throughout the night, the study shows.
The sugar that plants make during the day using photosynthesis is their energy reserve for the night. The plant’s biological clock must predict the Time of sunrise and estimate the duration of night in order to precisely adjust its metabolic capacity, which is essential for the plant to achieve the fullest growth using environmental resources.
To understand the mechanisms by which sugar affects the biological clock, researchers conducted experiments on plant seedlings to measure their gene expression in the presence of altered photosynthesis or sugar supply.
They identified a set of genes controlled by superoxide that are closely related to metabolic activity. Most of these genes are active at night and also play a key role within the biological clock mechanism. They found that if superoxide production is inhibited, the effect that sugar plays on the biological clock genes at dusk time is suppressed.
Co-investigator Ian Graham, of the Centre for Research in Novel Agricultural Products at the University of York, said, “It is difficult to distinguish between the role of light and sugar within photosynthetic cells. Our data suggest that superoxide is a signal associated with a rhythm of sugar levels that acts at night to control gene expression in the biological clock and plant growth.”
This study was published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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