Scientists Try to Understand Sugar Movement in Plants

Plant scientists from the University of Missouri's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources (CAFNR) borrowed a tool from medicine to unravel how plants fight off pest attacks. The scientists show how plants divide and share sugars to protect against attackers using positron emission tomography (PET) scans.

The team led by Jack Schultz and Abigail Ferrieri used Arabidopsis to investigate how and where sugars travel when young leaves are attacked by pests. Radioactive sugar was fed to the plant's old leaves. Ferrieri then injured young leaves with a mechanical wheel and introduced methyl jasmonate to the wounds to send signals to other plant parts that an attack is happening. They then took PET scans to determine where these sugars traveled. Ferrieri found that most sugars travel to roots and also to leaves in a line above and below them, in the injured plant. Three hours later, PET scans showed that radioactive sugars migrated to the attacked leaves regardless of whether they were in the same row on the stem. Damaged leaves then used those sugars to make phenolic glycosides, compounds that help defend the leaf. Using the more short-lived radioactive tracers, Ferrieri saw leaves send sugar to the roots within minutes of an attack on nearby leaves, and 24 hours later, damaged leaves started receiving more sugar.

Read more about this research in the paper published by Plant Physiology available at http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/161/2/692.short. The CAFNR news release can be read at http://cafnrnews.com/2013/12/the-sweet-path/.