Usually, surprises are not well received in a lab setting. Ideally, you would want to know what you’re doing every step of your experiment, and unexpected results would suggest that something went wrong. However, serendipity would occasionally find its way into science and uncover a ground-breaking discovery. This is one of those times — a story of scientists who brought dying plants back to life.
A four leaf clover, signifying the rare serendipitous discoveries in science.
Plants survive by adapting to their constantly changing environment and the stress that comes with it, be it starvation, infection, or salt overload. Scientists from UC Riverside (UCR) initially wanted to figure out which part of the plant is responsible for dealing with these stresses and the mechanisms that underlie these processes. No one expected this study to end with the shocking discovery that an organelle within plant cells, along with a protein that resides in the organelle, might play a role in anti-aging.
Golgi and COG
The Golgi Apparatus (or just Golgi) is the cellular organelle that resembles a stack of flattened discs. Some might even say it looks like a stack of pancakes. Golgi is the sorting centre and post office of the cell — it’s role is to modify proteins and molecules, then sort them to different parts of the cell.
The protein in question is the hetero-octameric conserved oligomeric Golgi (COG) complex, which resides in the Golgi and essentially drives the localisation and trafficking function of the organelle.
To better understand the role of COG in plant survival, UCR scientists removed one of the subunits of the complex, COG7, from Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale cress). This means that the plant now no longer possesses a functional COG protein. By observing how the mutant plant responds to stresses, scientists were able to study the functions of COG.
Unexpected discovery
The cog7 mutant grew just like the wild type plant under normal conditions — happily and healthily. However, when deprived of light, the COG mutants exhibit a few physiological and biochemical changes:
yellowing and wrinkling of the leaves
thin stature
excessive glycosylation, which is a type of modification done in the Golgi where sugars are attached to proteins and molecules
increased autophagy, a “self-eating” process where cells digest their own organelles, usually for nutrients when resources are scarce
increased protein degradation by a process called ubiquitination
To validate these observations, the scientists reversed the mutation by re-expressing cog7 in the plant. This produced a fascinating result: the changes in the mutant were all reversed, and the plant came back to life as if the mutation never happened in the first place. It was like COG brought life back into the light-deprived plant, which highlights how important COG is — biochemically and physiologically.
Experimental results showing age reversal. From left to right: wild type plant with no mutations, cog7 mutant, cog7 mutant re-expressing cog2, and cog7 mutant re-expressing cog5. Cog2 and cog5 are both subunits of the COG complex. (Choi et al., 2023)
This study gave critical insight into how plants age and die under stress, but it also provides a basis to extend our knowledge of Golgi and its possible role in human aging.
So, maybe you could say that a stack of pancakes holds the key to human aging — who knew?
References:
Choi HS, Bjornson M, Liang J, Wang J, Ke H, Hur M, et al. COG-imposed Golgi functional integrity determines the onset of dark-induced senescence. Nature Plants [Internet]. 2023, Nov, 1 [cited 2024 Jan 31];9(11):1890–901. Available from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-023-01545-3
Riverside U of C -. New Discovery Brings Nearly Dead Plants Back to Life [Internet]. SciTechDaily. 2024 [cited 2024 Jan 31]. Available from: https://scitechdaily.com/new-discovery-brings-nearly-dead-plants-back-to-life/
Related Posts
