Sugars drive ‘Plant-time’

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have shown that plant sugars help tune the time of their internal circadian clocks.

Knowing the time is a huge advantage, but unlike humans, plants don’t have wrist-watches. Like humans however they have an inbuilt time-keeper, their circadian rhythm, which keeps 24 hour time. This circadian rhythm is responsible for jet-lag, where your body clock has become out of sync with your new time-zone, but also has many advantages especially for plants as it allows them to predict and prepare for the arrival of dawn. This internal clock can be reset using environmental cues such as sunlight. New work published in Nature has shown that feeding periods also have a role to play in the fine-tuning of ‘plant-time’.

Research had already shown that providing an external source of sugar altered the plant’s clock. Scientists at the University of Cambridge wanted to investigate what role the sugars produced by the plant itself had on their internal clock.

They found that sugars produced by photosynthesis fed information back into the circadian clock to help it keep accurate time. This was demonstrated by placing the plants in a carbon dioxide free environment, so photosynthesis couldn’t take place, where their clocks began to run more slowly. The researchers also found that the sugars regulated key clock-related genes.

Uncovering that the plant’s metabolism plays such a crucial role in time-keeping has implications in cultivation of plants under artificial conditions and neatly mirrors similar findings in animals.

Read the original article online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12603