responses of plants to salinity stress and development of salt tolerance are extremely complex and various mechanisms appear to be involved. we employed a proteomic approach to study the mechanism of plant responses to salinity in a sensitive cultivar of barley (527 line). three-week-old seedlings were treated with 300 mm nacl for 3 weeks. total proteins of fourth leaf were extracted and separa...

Scission of plant cell wall polysaccharides in vivo has generally been assumed to be enzymic. However, in the presence of l-ascorbate, such polysaccharides are shown to undergo non-enzymic scission under physiologically relevant conditions. Scission of xyloglucan by 1 mM ascorbate had a pH optimum of 4.5, and the maximum scission rate was reached after a 10-25-min delay. Catalase prevented the ...

One-year-old grapevines (Vitis labrusca L. cv. Concord) were supplied with 0, 5, 10, 15, or 20 mM nitrogen (N) in a modified Hoagland's solution twice weekly for 4 weeks. As leaf N decreased in response to N limitation, leaf chlorophyll (Chl) decreased linearly whereas leaf absorptance declined curvilinearly. Compared with high N leaves, low N leaves had lower quantum efficiency of PSII as a re...

Tyrosine hydroxylase activity is reversibly modulated by the actions of a number of protein kinases and phosphoprotein phosphatases. A previous report from this laboratory showed that low-molecular-weight substances present in striatal extracts lead to an irreversible loss of tyrosine hydroxylase activity under cyclic AMP-dependent phosphorylation conditions. We report here that ascorbate is on...

Vitamin C is transported in the brain by sodium vitamin C co-transporter 2 (SVCT-2) for ascorbate and glucose transporters for dehydroascorbate. Here we have studied the expression of SVCT-2 and the uptake and release of [(14)C] ascorbate in chick retinal cells. SVCT-2 immunoreactivity was detected in rat and chick retina, specially in amacrine cells and in cells in the ganglion cell layer. Acc...

An F(1) progeny derived from a cross between the apple (Malus x domestica) cultivars Telamon and Braeburn was used to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) linked to the vitamin C (l-ascorbate [l-AA]) contents of fruit skin and flesh (cortex) tissues. We identified up to three highly significant QTLs for both the mean l-AA and the mean total l-AA contents of fruit flesh on both parental geneti...

Glutathione/ glutathione disulfide and ascorbic acid /dehydroascorbateare two major redox pairs that control the redox-state in a developing seed.Recently these redox compounds have been shown to exert strong positive effectson embryo development in several plants including white spruce. A picture isemerging that early-stage embryo development occurs best in the presence of a<lb...

Leaf senescence is a typical symptom in plants exposed to dark and may be regulated by plant growth regulators. The objective of this study was to determine whether exogenous application of melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) suppresses dark-induced leaf senescence and the effects of melatonin on reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging system and chlorophyll degradation pathway in perenni...

Recycling of ascorbic acid from its oxidized forms helps to maintain the vitamin in human erythrocytes. To determine the relative contributions of recycling from the ascorbate radical and dehydroascorbic acid, we studied erythrocytes exposed to a trans-membrane oxidant stress from ferricyanide. Ferricyanide was used both to induce oxidant stress across the cell membrane and to quantify ascorbat...