Abstract
Plant cells face many changes through their life cycle and develop several mechanisms to cope with adversity. Stress caused by environmental factors is turning out to be more and more relevant as the human population grows and plant cultures start to fail. As eukaryotes, plant cells must coordinate several processes occurring between compartments and combine different pathways for protein transport to several cellular locations. Conventionally, these pathways begin at the ER, or endoplasmic reticulum, move through the Golgi and deliver cargo to the vacuole or to the plasma membrane. However, when under stress, protein trafficking in plants is compromised, usually leading to changes in the endomembrane system that may include protein transport through unconventional routes and alteration of morphology, activity and content of key organelles, as the ER and the vacuole. Such events provide the tools for cells to adapt and overcome the challenges brought on by stress. With this review, we gathered fragmented information on the subject, highlighting how such changes are processed within the endomembrane system and how it responds to an ever-changing environment. Even though the available data on this subject are still sparse, novel information is starting to untangle the complexity and dynamics of protein transport routes and their role in maintaining cell homeostasis under harsh conditions.
Highlights
Climate changes stand, nowadays, as the foremost threat to human and environmental health, causing crop failures worldwide and leading to food safety issues [1]
More recent data suggest that the classical view of protein transport to the vacuole might be challenged by alternative routes that have begun to be described in more recent years [12,13,14]
The authors show that AtRMR1, AtVSR1, AtSYP51 and AtVTI12 genes, involved in the protein storage vacuole (PSV) sorting, are positively regulated under abiotic stress, while genes involved in the lytic vacuole (LV) sorting, such as AtVTI11 and AtVSR2, are downregulated. These findings enable the authors to create a hypothesis where the PSV route would be enhanced under abiotic stress conditions, in detriment of the LV pathway
Summary
Nowadays, as the foremost threat to human and environmental health, causing crop failures worldwide and leading to food safety issues [1]. The diverse environmental stresses often activate signals and pathways involved in similar cellular responses: overexpression of antioxidants, accumulation of solutes, changes in protein trafficking and endomembrane remodelling [3,4,5,6]. By using high throughput screening techniques, such as microarrays and RNA sequencing, it was possible to identify many stress-related genes These techniques provide us with important information and suggest genes among which it is possible to identify new markers for assisted selection of crop varieties resistant to stress. More recent data suggest that the classical view of protein transport to the vacuole might be challenged by alternative routes that have begun to be described in more recent years [12,13,14] These alternative routes are thought to be one of the plant responses to adverse conditions. We intend to bring together the mechanistic information available on the endomembrane system’s adaptations and responses to stress, focusing on the vacuolar route and associated vesicle transport mechanisms
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