TOKYO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- A research team at Tohoku University in Japan recently found that the phenomenon of legume rain trees closing their leaves when it rains is related to the drop in temperature, a molecule that controls the closing of rain tree leaves at night and opening during the day while acting as a temperature receptor. The results have been published in the American journal Current Biology.
Northeastern University recently issued a press release saying that temperature is one of the environmental factors that can affect cell activities to a large extent, so sensing temperature is very important for all organisms, and the mechanism of plant temperature perception has always been a mystery.
Minoru Ueda, a professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Science, and other researchers noticed that rain trees close their leaves when it rains, and found that the drop in leaf temperature is the cause of leaf closure.
Rain trees close their leaves at night and reopen in the morning, and this sleep-like movement of plants is called plant nocturnality. Minoru Ueda et al. (2018) reported that the potassium channel SPORK2 present in the cells of the petiole site controls the nocturnal nature of rain trees. In this study, they also found that SPORK2 also has the ability to sense temperature changes.
The researchers also discovered the activity of the Spork2 ortholog gene in two other plants of the legume family, as well as the most common model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and found that the proteins synthesized by these genes are also temperature-sensing ion channels. This proves that temperature-sensing molecules may be ubiquitous in the plant kingdom.
The communiqué said that climate change has had a serious impact on crop production in recent years, and understanding the mechanism by which plants adapt to temperature changes is an urgent issue for stabilizing food production. (ENDS).