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Lookup NU author(s): Emerita Professor Anne Borland
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Already a proven mechanism for drought resilience, crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) is a specialized type of photosynthesis that maximizes water-use efficiency (WUE) via an inverse (compared to C3 and C4 photosynthesis) day/night pattern of stomatal closure/opening to shift CO2 uptake to the night, when evapotranspiration rates are low. A systems-level understanding of temporal molecular and metabolic controls is needed to define the cellular behavior underpinning CAM. Here, we report high-resolution temporal behaviors of transcript, protein and metabolite abundances across a CAM diel cycle and, where applicable, compare those observations to the well-established C3 model plant, Arabidopsis. A mechanistic finding that emerged is that CAM operates with a diel redox poise that is shifted relative to that in Arabidopsis. Moreover, we identify widespread rescheduled expression of genes associated with signal transduction mechanisms that regulate stomatal opening/closing. Controlled production and degradation of transcripts and proteins represents a timing mechanism by which to regulate cellular function, yet knowledge of how this molecular timekeeping regulates CAM is unknown. Here, we provide new insights into complex post-transcriptional and -translational hierarchies that govern CAM in Agave. These data sets provide a resource to inform efforts to engineer more efficient CAM traits into economically valuable C3 crops.
Author(s): Abraham PE, Yin H, Borland AM, Weighill D, Lim SD, DePaoli HC, Engle N, Jones PC, Agh R, Weston DJ, Wullschleger SD, Tschaplinski T, Jacobson D, Cushman JC, Hettich RL, Tuskan GA, Yang X
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Plants
Year: 2016
Volume: 2
Online publication date: 21/11/2016
Acceptance date: 20/10/2016
Date deposited: 17/10/2016
ISSN (print): 2055-026X
ISSN (electronic): 2055-0278
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.178
DOI: 10.1038/nplants.2016.178
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