Herself's Houseplants

You know that carnivorous plants eat bugs. The pitcher part of the plant acts as a stomach. Some scientists in Japan have recently figured out what chemicals they use to do this.

Japanese scientists now report completely deciphering this complex cocktail of digestive and antibacterial enzymes. Their study is scheduled for the February issue of ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research.Unlike other plants that absorb nutrients from the soil, carnivorous plants growing in nutrient-poor soils have special organs to capture insects, digest them and absorb the nitrogen and phosphorous their environment sorely lacks. The identity of all the myriad proteins involved in this evolutionary marvel — some of which could have beneficial applications in medicine and agriculture — has been a mystery until now.

Tatsuro Hamada and Naoya Hatano used cutting-edge proteomic analysis to identify all of the components. They isolated and sequenced the proteins, then compared each with existing proteins to find structural matches.

Hamada and Hatano detected seven proteins that exist mainly in the pitcher fluid of N. alata — three of which can only be found in this species — including useful enzymes that may inhibit bacterial growth and rotting as the plant slowly digests its prey. [ read more Secret of the carnivorous pitcher plant's slurp]

Also reporting on this story in more detail is Nature…

The fluid at the base of the trap had long been thought to contain digestive enzymes. Previous research had confirmed this, but exactly which enzymes were present was anyone’s guess. “Digestion in pitcher plants has been actively studied for more than 150 years and we still don’t know how it works [because] it is such a complex process,” says Chris Frazier at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Now, Naoya Hatano from the Harima Institute in Riken and Tatsuro Hamada from Ishikawa Prefectural University in Japan have identified seven proteins in the carnivorous plant’s fluid. They grew the carnivorous plants in their lab, and collected the fluid from newly opened pitchers to prevent contamination from recently captured insects. Then they used polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis to separate out the proteins, and mass spectrometry to identify what type of enzymes the proteins were likely to be. Because some of the enzymes they found were unfamiliar, they searched protein databases to find enzymes with similar structures and noted that some of them were probably not digestive at all. [ read more Little lab of horrors ]

This didn’t get much play in the press and that is a shame. It is the beginning of a brave new world for plants.

Scientists said on Wednesday they have finished the first genetic map of a plant in a groundbreaking achievement that could herald a new green revolution.

The tiny flowering weed Arabidopsis thaliana, or Thale cress, may not look like much but the sequencing of its genome, all its nearly 26,000 genes, provides the green chapter in the book of life and a blueprint for a greater understanding of all plants.

Scientists said knowing how its genes function and what they do will lead to hardier, more nutritious, higher yielding crops, better tasting and longer-lasting food and new insights into human diseases and how to treat them.

“Genome sequencing changes the way we do biology. From this point onwards plant science will never be the same again and genetics will never be the same again,” Professor Mike Bevan, of the John Innes plant research center in England, told a news conference. . . [ read more Scientists Harvest Plant Genome ]