Publikationen - Molekulare Signalverarbeitung

Leaves of barley (Hordeum vulgare L. cv. Salome ) treated with jasmonic acid (JA), its methyl ester (JM), or its amino acid conjugates exhibit up‐regulation of specific genes and down‐regulation of house‐keeping genes. This transcriptional regulation exhibits several specificities. (i) The (−)‐enantiomers are more active, and conjugates are mainly active if they carry an l ‐amino acid moiety. (ii) The various JA‐responsive genes respond differentially to enantiomeric and chiralic forms. (iii) Both JA and its amino acid conjugates exhibiting no or negligible interconversion induce/repress genes.

We investigated transgenic tobacco lines which express different amounts of the barley JIP 23. In these plants the amount of several proteins decreased proportionally to increasing amounts of JIP 23 whereas the transcript levels were constant as determined for the small and the large subunit of RuBPCase. However, the translation initiation of the rbcS transcript was found to be less efficient than in the wild type. In contrast, the jip 23 transcript was efficiently initiated, indicating that no unspecific impairment of initiation occurred. The data suggest that the barley JIP 23 leads to discrimination among certain tobacco transcripts during translation initiation.

At early stages of germination, a special lipoxygenase is expressed in cotyledons of cucumber and several other plants. This enzyme is localized at the lipid storage organelles and oxygenates their storage triacylglycerols. We have isolated this lipid body lipoxygenase from cucumber seedlings and found that it is capable of oxygenating in vitro di- and trilinolein to the corresponding mono-, di-, and trihydroperoxy derivatives. To investigate the in vivo activity of this enzyme during germination, lipid bodies were isolated from cucumber seedlings at different stages of germination, and the triacylglycerols were analyzed for oxygenated derivatives by a combination of high pressure liquid chromatography, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We identified as major oxygenation products triacylglycerols that contained one, two, or three 13S-hydroperoxy-9(Z),11(E)-octadecadienoic acid residues. During germination, the amount of oxygenated lipids increased strongly, reaching a maximum after 72 h and declining afterward. The highly specific pattern of hydroperoxy lipids formed suggested the involvement of the lipid body lipoxygenase in their biosynthesis.These data suggest that this lipoxygenase may play an important role during the germination process of cucumber and other plants and support our previous hypothesis that the specific oxygenation of the storage lipids may initiate their mobilization as a carbon and energy source for the growing seedling.

A clone of an ubiquitin‐conjugating enzyme (UBC) was isolated from a λ‐ZAP‐cDNA library, generated from mRNA of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) cells grown in suspension for 3 days. The open reading frame called Le UBC1, encodes for a polypeptide with a predicted molecular mass of 21.37 kDa, which was confirmed by bacterial overexpression and SDS‐PAGE. Database searches with Le UBC1 showed highest sequence similarities to UBC1 of bovine and yeast. By Southern blot analysis Le UBC1 was identified as a member of a small E2 subfamily of tomato, presumably consisting of at least two members. As revealed by Northern blot analysis Le UBC1 is constitutively expressed in an exponentially growing tomato cell culture. In response to heat shock an increase in Le UBC1‐mRNA was detectable. A strong accumulation of the Le UBC1‐transcript was observed by exposure to heavy metal stress which was performed by treatment with cadmium chloride (CdCl2). The cellular uptake of cadmium was controlled via ICP‐MS measurements. The data suggest that like in yeast, in plants a certain subfamily of UBC is specifically involved in the proteolytic degradation of abnormal proteins as result of stress.

The germination process of oilseed plants is characterized by a mobilization of the storage lipids which constitute the major carbon source for the growing seedling. Despite the physiological importance of the lipid mobilization, the mechanism of this process is not well understood. Recently, it was found that a specific linoleate 13-lipoxygenase is induced during the stage of lipid mobilization in various oilseed plants and that this enzyme is translocated to the membranes of the lipid storage organelles, the so called lipid bodies. Lipoxygenase expression was paralleled by the occurrence of enantiospecific hydro(pero)xy polyenoic fatty acid derivatives in the storage lipids suggesting the in vivo action of the enzyme. Furthermore, it was reported that oxygenated polyenoic fatty acids, in particular as 13(S)-hydro(pero)xy-9(Z),11(E)-octadecanoic acid [13(S)-H(P)ODE], are cleaved preferentially from the storage lipids when compared with their non-oxygenated linoleate residues. These findings may suggest that 13(S)-H(P)ODE may constitute the endogenous substrate for β-oxidation during lipid mobilization of oilseed plants.