Vitamin D5 in Arabidopsis thaliana

Daniele Silvestro,Dimitri Heintz,Julien Delecolle,Poul Erik Jensen,Claire Villette,Michel Miesch,Mohammed Saddik Motawia,Philippe Geoffroy,Carl Erik Olsen,Hubert Schaller

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34775-z

Abstract

Vitamin D3 is a secosterol hormone critical for bone growth and calcium homeostasis, produced in vertebrate skin by photolytic conversion of the cholesterol biosynthetic intermediate provitamin D3. Insufficient levels of vitamin D3 especially in the case of low solar UV-B irradiation is often compensated by an intake of a dietary source of vitamin D3 of animal origin. Small amounts of vitamin D3 were described in a few plant species and considered as a peculiar feature of their phytochemical diversity. In this report we show the presence of vitamin D5 in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. This plant secosterol is a UV-B mediated derivative of provitamin D5, the precursor of sitosterol. The present work will allow a further survey of vitamin D distribution in plant species.

Highlights

Vitamin D3 is a secosterol hormone critical for bone growth and calcium homeostasis, produced in vertebrate skin by photolytic conversion of the cholesterol biosynthetic intermediate provitamin D3
In this report we show the presence of vitamin D5 in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana
Sitosterol biosynthesis requires the mandatory reduction of the C-7(8) double bond of Δ5,7-sitosterol by Δ5,7-sterol-Δ7-reductase (Figs 1B and S1) exactly like the conversion of Δ5,7-cholesterol to cholesterol[1,14,15]

Summary

Introduction

Vitamin D3 is a secosterol hormone critical for bone growth and calcium homeostasis, produced in vertebrate skin by photolytic conversion of the cholesterol biosynthetic intermediate provitamin D3. In this report we show the presence of vitamin D5 in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. This plant secosterol is a UV-B mediated derivative of provitamin D5, the precursor of sitosterol. We report the presence of vitamin D5 in Arabidopsis thaliana This species is the most investigated plant as a model in biology a large part of its genome is still annotated as unknown and its metabolome is not exhaustively described. Species of the Solanum or Nicotiana genera (such as tomato and tobacco) attracted particular attention because they contain cholesterol in significant amount: about 10% or more of the total sterols compared to 1–2% in other families[12] In these plants, sterol biogenesis displays a cholesterol-specific biosynthetic segment that parallels the biosynthesis of 24-methylsterols (campesterol, brassicasterol) and 24-ethylsterols (sitosterol, stigmasterol)[13]. Vitamin D5 (sitocalciferol) (Fig. 1A) is a synthetic analog of vitamin D currently described in data bases

Methods

Results

Conclusion