Abstract
The plasma membrane is a physical boundary made of amphiphilic lipid molecules, proteins and carbohydrates extensions. Its role in mechanotransduction generates increasing attention in animal systems, where membrane tension is mainly induced by cortical actomyosin. In plant cells, cortical tension is of osmotic origin. Yet, because the plasma membrane in plant cells has comparable physical properties, findings from animal systems likely apply to plant cells too. Recent results suggest that this is indeed the case, with a role of membrane tension in vesicle trafficking, mechanosensitive channel opening or cytoskeleton organization in plant cells. Prospects for the plant science community are at least three fold: (i) to develop and use probes to monitor membrane tension in tissues, in parallel with other biochemical probes, with implications for protein activity and nanodomain clustering, (ii) to develop single cell approaches to decipher the mechanisms operating at the plant cell cortex at high spatio-temporal resolution, and (iii) to revisit the role of membrane composition at cell and tissue scale, by considering the physical implications of phospholipid properties and interactions in mechanotransduction.
Highlights
Leia Colin and Olivier Hamant membranaire dans les tissus, en parallèle avec d’autres sondes biochimiques, avec des implications pour l’activité des protéines et le regroupement en nanodomaines, (ii) développer des approches unicellulaires pour déchiffrer les mécanismes opérant au niveau du cortex cellulaire des plantes à haute résolution spatio-temporelle, et (iii) réexaminer le rôle de la composition de la membrane à l’échelle de la cellule et du tissu, en considérant les implications physiques des propriétés et des interactions des phospholipides dans la mécanotransduction
Because plants are usually fixed in the soil, they are exposed to external mechanical perturbations: gravity, wind, rain impacts, contact with neighboring living organisms and mineral elements, water potential fluctuations
The plasma membrane is thought to be under tension because of the high turgor pressure in plant cells
Summary
Beyond their biochemical nature, living organisms can be considered as physical objects experiencing mechanical stress. From a mechanical point of view, growth involves both water uptake (driven by a water potential difference) and cell wall yielding to turgor pressure [1] This is recapitulated in the Lockhart’s equation, which mathematically formalized plant cell growth as:. PIPs are minor phospholipids, which can be phosphorylated on the 3rd, 4th and/or 5th position of the inositol head group to generate up to seven PIP species, such as phosphatidylinositol-4-phosphate (PI4P) and phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate (PI(4,5)P2) (Figure 1B) [13] Signaling lipids ensure their regulatory role thanks to several features. They are negatively charged and can display interaction domains (e.g. Pleckstrin Homology domain (PH) [14, 15], Phox homology domain (PX) [16]), which allow them to interact and to recruit proteins to the plasma membrane (Figure 1C). Many studies start to decipher the role of the plasma membrane in cell signaling, its contribution in mechanical signaling pathways remains largely unknown in plants
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