Overcoming redundancy in the Arabidopsis TREHALOSE-6-PHOSPHATE PHOSPHATASE family reveals connections to development and iron homeostasis.
Skopelitis T, Swentowsky KW, Goldshmidt A, Müller L, Feil R
Plant Signaling
When your tomatoes or fruit trees branch poorly or show yellowing leaves despite fertilizing, the culprit could be a sugar-signaling breakdown that's also starving the plant of iron — and this research maps exactly how those two problems are wired together.
Thale cress (a tiny relative of mustard and cabbage) has 10 nearly identical genes that work as a team to control how the plant branches, when it flowers, and how it absorbs iron. Researchers disabled all 10 at once using a gene-editing tool and found the plants grew extra branches, flowered early, and turned yellow from iron deficiency — even when iron was present in the soil. The connection turned out to run through a sugar molecule called trehalose-6-phosphate, which acts like a walkie-talkie passing messages between the plant's growth programs and its nutrient-uptake systems.
Key Findings
Knocking out all 10 TPP genes caused increased shoot branching and earlier flowering, defects partially rescued by re-introducing a single GFP-tagged gene (TPPI) that localizes to meristems, vascular tissue, and cell nuclei.
The 10× mutants accumulated higher trehalose-6-phosphate and lower trehalose, and were chlorotic with low iron levels that could be rescued by iron supplementation.
Iron-responsive and developmental genes were upregulated while photosynthesis genes were repressed in the 10× mutants, linking Tre6P sugar signaling to both iron homeostasis and photosynthetic capacity.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists knocked out all 10 copies of a gene family in Arabidopsis and found they collectively control branching, flowering time, iron uptake, and photosynthesis — revealing that plants use sugar-signaling molecules to coordinate growth and nutrition simultaneously.
Abstract Preview
Arabidopsis encodes 10 TREHALOSE-6-PHOSPHATE PHOSPHATASE (TPP) genes, homologous to maize RAMOSA3 (RA3), which controls shoot branching. Here, we explored the functions of the Arabidopsis TPPs. We ...
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Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress, mouse-ear cress or arabidopsis, is a small plant from the mustard family (Brassicaceae), native to Eurasia and Africa. Commonly found along the shoulders of roads and in disturbed land, it is generally considered a weed.