Ancient pond alga already had a plant stress-signaling toolkit
Heß DA, Shukla A, Jessen HJ, Hess WR
Plant Signaling
The scraggly green stonewort in a pond edge or aquarium carries the same phosphorus-handling signals your tomatoes and lawn grass use to react to heat and shifting light, and those signals are far older than any garden.
Scientists looked inside Chara braunii, a stonewort alga that's a close cousin of the ancestors of all land plants. They found a rich set of phosphorus-based chemical messengers, and the alga changed their levels as it grew and when it got hot or sat in long light or dark stretches. Land plants use similar messengers, so this chemical alarm system was already working before plants left the water.
Key Findings
Capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry detected inositol phosphates and pyrophosphates from InsP3 to InsP8, including several positional isomers, in Chara braunii.
InsP6 was the dominant molecule across dormant oospores, young thalli and mature thalli, while lower InsPs and pyrophosphorylated forms changed by developmental stage; an unassigned InsP8-like signal was also found.
1-PP-InsP5 responded most strongly to prolonged light and dark phases, while heat stress preferentially lowered 4-PP-InsP5; bioinformatics found candidate homologs of land-plant InsP metabolic enzymes.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Stonewort, a freshwater green alga related to the ancestors of land plants, already had a complex chemical signaling system built from inositol phosphates. It shifts these molecules in response to light, dark and heat, which suggests land plants inherited a stress-sensing toolkit that predates life on land.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Inositol phosphates, pyrophosphates and the genes involved in their turnover in the streptophyte green alga Chara braunii.
Inositol phosphates (InsPs) and inositol pyrophosphates (PP-InsPs) are conserved signalling molecules, but their evolutionary origin and diversification in the green lineage remain poorly understoo...
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Charales is an order of freshwater green algae in the division Charophyta, class Charophyceae, commonly known as stoneworts. Depending on the treatment of the genus Nitellopsis, living (extant) species are placed into either one family (Characeae) or two. Further families are used for fossil memb...