Plant sugar gatekeepers could be key to tougher crops
Chen LQ, Kim JY, Yoshinari A, Gong T, Rouina H
Crop Improvement
The tomatoes ripening on your vine and the beans swelling in their pods are being filled with sugar through these exact molecular gates, and tweaking them is already a target for breeding hardier, higher-yielding varieties.
Every plant has to move sugar from the leaves where it's made to the roots, seeds, and fruit where it's needed, and a family of proteins called SWEETs act like doorways that let that sugar through cell walls. This review rounds up what scientists have recently learned about how picky these doorways are about which sugars they let through, how they work at the cell level, and how plants use them to trade sugar with helpful fungi and bacteria underground. Researchers think fine-tuning these sugar doorways could help us grow crops that cope better with stress and produce more food or fuel.
Key Findings
SWEET transporters are an ancient protein family found across archaea, bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, plants, and animals, but play especially central roles in plant carbon allocation.
Recent structural and functional studies reveal finer details of substrate specificity and transport selectivity, including cell-type-specific SWEET activity within plant tissues.
Emerging evidence links SWEETs to symbiotic carbon exchange with microbiomes, suggesting these transporters could be engineered to improve crop resilience, carbon partitioning, and biofuel yield.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists are refining their understanding of SWEET proteins, tiny gateways that move sugar through plants from leaves to roots, seeds, and fruit, and even feed helpful microbes. Fine-tuning these sugar gates could help breeders grow crops that handle drought better and yield more food or biofuel.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
SWEET uniporters - a 2026 update.
SWEETs are a family of ancient sugar transporters found in Archaea, Eubacteria, oomycetes, fungi, plants and metazoa. In plants, SWEETs play central roles in carbon allocation from source to sink t...
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