Involvement of Phospholipase C in Photosynthesis and Growth of Maize Seedlings

Genome-Wide Identification and Analysis of Phospholipase C Gene Family Reveals Orthologs, Co-Expression Networks, and Expression Profiling Under Abiotic Stress in Sorghum bicolor

Phospholipase C (PLC) is an essential enzyme involved in lipid signaling pathways crucial for regulating plant growth and responding to environmental stress. In sorghum, 11 PLC genes have been identified, comprising 6 PI-PLCs and 5 NPCs. Through phylogenetic and interspecies collinearity analyses, structural similarities between SbPLCs and ZmPLCs proteins have been observed, with a particularly strong collinearity between SbPLCs and OsPLCs. Promoter function analysis has shown that SbPLCs are significantly enriched under abiotic stress and hormonal stimuli, like ABA, jasmonic acid, drought, high temperature, and salt. Gene co-expression networks, constructed using a weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), highlight distinct expression patterns of SbPLC1, SbPLC3a, and SbPLC4 in response to abiotic stress, providing further insights into the expression patterns and interactions of SbPLCs under various environmental stimuli. qRT-PCR results reveal variations in expression levels among most SbPLCs members under different stress conditions (drought, NaCl, NaHCO3), hormone treatments (ABA), and developmental stages, indicating both specific and overlapping expression patterns. This comprehensive analysis offers valuable insights into the roles of SbPLCs in sorghum, shedding light on their specific expression patterns, regulatory elements, and protein interactions across different environmental stimuli and developmental stages.

Phospholipid Signaling in Crop Plants: A Field to Explore

In plant models such as Arabidopsis thaliana, phosphatidic acid (PA), a key molecule of lipid signaling, was shown not only to be involved in stress responses, but also in plant development and nutrition. In this article, we highlight lipid signaling existing in crop species. Based on open access databases, we update the list of sequences encoding phospholipases D, phosphoinositide-dependent phospholipases C, and diacylglycerol-kinases, enzymes that lead to the production of PA. We show that structural features of these enzymes from model plants are conserved in equivalent proteins from selected crop species. We then present an in-depth discussion of the structural characteristics of these proteins before focusing on PA binding proteins. For the purpose of this article, we consider RESPIRATORY BURST OXIDASE HOMOLOGUEs (RBOHs), the most documented PA target proteins. Finally, we present pioneering experiments that show, by different approaches such as monitoring of gene expression, use of pharmacological agents, ectopic over-expression of genes, and the creation of silenced mutants, that lipid signaling plays major roles in crop species. Finally, we present major open questions that require attention since we have only a perception of the peak of the iceberg when it comes to the exciting field of phospholipid signaling in plants.