A joint research group of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Tohoku University, and Tokyo Metropolitan University has discovered that the SWEET protein, which has been considered as a sugar transporter in plants, transports the plant hormone "gibberellin".The development of transport control technology will make it possible to increase crop yields.
Gibberellin is a small molecule compound that promotes seed germination, elongation and growth, flower bud formation and flowering, and is widely used in agriculture and horticulture.Although many factors involved in gibberellin metabolism and signal transduction have been identified so far, little has been clarified as to how gibberellin is transported in plants.
The collaborative research group has used a yeast two-hybrid system (a method for detecting the binding of two types of proteins in yeast cells) that has used receptors for plant hormones such as gibberellin, abscisic acid, and jasmonic acid as sensors. By doing so, we have developed a method for comprehensively finding proteins that transport these plant hormones.Using this method, we discovered that Arabidopsis thaliana proteins SWEET2 and SWEET13 are transporters that take gibberellin into cells. SWEET proteins are widely present as sugar transporters from bacteria to higher organisms, but this is the first time that SWEET proteins have been shown to transport compounds other than sugars.
In the future, by changing the local distribution of gibberellin in the plant body, it will be possible to develop new growth control technology that leads to an increase in plant yield by precisely controlling plant growth, seed germination, flowering, etc. It is said that it will be.It can also be expected to be a starting point for clarifying how the transport of a wide variety of compounds present in plants is controlled by a limited number of transporters.
