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Research article2015Peer reviewedOpen access

Stomatal Guard Cells Co-opted an Ancient ABA-Dependent Desiccation Survival System to Regulate Stomatal Closure

Lind, Christof; Dreyer, ingo; Meyer, Katharina von; Ishizaki, Kimitsune; Lang, Daniel; Zhao, Yang; Al-Rasheid, Khaled A.S.; Ronne, Hans; Zhu, Jian-Kang; Hedrich, Rainer

Abstract

During the transition from water to land, plants had to cope with the loss of water through transpiration, the inevitable result of photosynthetic CO2 fixation on land [1, 2]. Control of transpiration became possible through the development of a new cell type: guard cells, which form stomata. In vascular plants, stomatal regulation is mediated by the stress hormone ABA, which triggers the opening of the SnR kinase OST1-activated anion channel SLAC1 [3, 4]. To understand the evolution of this regulatory circuit, we cloned both ABA-signaling elements, SLAC1 and OST1, from a charophyte alga, a liverwort, and a moss, and functionally analyzed the channel-kinase interactions. We were able to show that the emergence of stomata in the last common ancestor of mosses and vascular plants coincided with the origin of SLAC1-type channels capable of using the ancient ABA drought signaling kinase OST1 for regulation of stomatal closure.

Published in

Current Biology
2015, Volume: 25, number: 7, pages: 928-935
Publisher: CELL PRESS

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
    Botany
    Evolutionary Biology

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.01.067

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/73877