Abstract
Heavy metal stress (HMS) is one of the most destructive abiotic stresses which seriously affects the growth and development of plants. Recent studies have shown significant progress in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying plant tolerance to HMS. In general, three core signals are involved in plants’ responses to HMS; these are mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), calcium, and hormonal (abscisic acid) signals. In addition to these signal components, other regulatory factors, such as microRNAs and membrane proteins, also play an important role in regulating HMS responses in plants. Membrane proteins interact with the highly complex and heterogeneous lipids in the plant cell environment. The function of membrane proteins is affected by the interactions between lipids and lipid-membrane proteins. Our review findings also indicate the possibility of membrane protein-lipid-metal ion interactions in regulating metal homeostasis in plant cells. In this review, we investigated the role of membrane proteins with specific substrate recognition in regulating cell metal homeostasis. The understanding of the possible interaction networks and upstream and downstream pathways is developed. In addition, possible interactions between membrane proteins, metal ions, and lipids are discussed to provide new ideas for studying metal homeostasis in plant cells.
Highlights
Accepted: 11 December 2021Heavy metal stress (HMS) negatively affects plant growth and reproduction, and it can cause the loss of essential agronomic and other agroecological traits in plants [1].the yield and quality of crops are seriously affected, while food with excessive accumulation of heavy metals (HMs) is one of the major threats to human health and natural ecosystems [2]
Plants have specific mechanisms to cope with HMS, and they have evolved a series of strategies such as ion sensing, signal transduction, and segregation detoxification to ensure their optimum survival and reproduction under a certain level of HMS [3,4,5]
A large number of studies have shown that the contents of lipids, phospholipids, glucolipids, and sterols in the membrane are significantly changed under abiotic stresses such as HMS and high salinity [29,30]
Summary
Heavy metal stress (HMS) negatively affects plant growth and reproduction, and it can cause the loss of essential agronomic and other agroecological traits in plants [1]. Some advances have been made in the understanding of plant stress responses, especially downstream pathways, with the discovery of several functional membrane protein gene clusters that play important roles in regulating intracellular metal homeostasis [6,7,8,9]. Some studies have demonstrated that plants can regulate the balance of metal ions in the cell by increasing the rate of synthesis of various proteins and/or compounds [12,13,14,15] This involves the molecular response signals of plants to HMS along with the regulation and transcription of some membrane proteins. We anticipate that this review will provide new insights into the mechanisms of metal homeostasis in plant cells
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