Feel the force!

Plants are remarkably sensitive to their environment, responding by appropriate growth and development to a wide range of environmental stimuli. In the case of gravity, the appropriate response is for stems to grow upwards (‘away from the source of gravity’; negative geotropism), and for roots to grow downwards (‘towards the source of gravity’; positive geotropism – for examples, see reviews by Elison Blancaflor and Patrick Masson  and by Miyo Morita). Although the details of the full pathway involved are still the subject of intense research efforts, a role for gravity-stimulated repositioning of cell-located statoliths (starch-bearing amyloplasts) in the gravity-detection side of things has long been proposed. However, the dynamic – rather than settled – nature of such amyloplasts has cast doubt on their effectiveness to act in this way. Now, elegant work by Masatsugu Toyota et al. has demonstrated that amyloplast displacement is necessary for gravisensing (in arabidopsis shoots). Using a custom-built centrifuge microscope they show that ‘sedimentary movements of amyloplasts under hypergravity conditions are linearly correlated with gravitropic curvature in wild-type stems’. Furthermore, and using a range of gravitropic mutants that do not exhibit a normal response under the Earth’s usual 1 g gravity field,  they demonstrate that their ‘hypergravity-induced amyloplast sedimentation and gravitropic curvature… was identical to that of wild-type plants’. Such work supports the view that arabidopsis shoots do have a gravisensing mechanism that converts the number of gravity-settling amyloplasts into gravitropic signals. And restoration of the gravitropic response by hypergravity in the gravitropic mutants examined indicates that those plants probably also have a functional gravisensing mechanism, albeit one that is not triggered at 1 g. Nice work. But in view of recent upsets (see previous ‘Ouch! That must hurt…’ post), I wonder if it also applies to non-arabidopsis plants…? Still, it is good to have the odd positive story about arabidopsis (I suppose…!).