The effect of sugar starvation on the metabolic response of isolated lamb’s lettuce (Valerianella locustaL.) cells

Abstract

Leafy vegetables are highly perishable as they are exposed to carbohydrate starvation during their postharvest storage life, leading to premature quality loss. An in-depth knowledge of the fundamental metabolic regulation and control mechanisms of these leafy vegetables to sugar starvation is beneficial in understanding how they modify their metabolism to survive in the absence of sugar. To this purpose, isolated lamb's lettuce cells were incubated in the dark to trigger sugar starvation at different temperatures (25, 18 and 1°C) to monitor the dynamic changes in the metabolome over time. To understand which pathways were up- or down-regulated, the isolated cells were preloaded with uniformly labelled 13C glucose and the distribution of the 13C label throughout the different metabolic pathways was monitored. The higher the temperature, moving from 1 to 25°C, the faster the effect of sugar starvation was induced.