The production and consumption of organic matter by marine organisms plays a central role in the carbon cycle. Labile compounds (metabolites) are major currency energetic demands organismal interaction, but these remain elusive because their rapid turnover concomitant minuscule concentrations dissolved pool. Organic osmolytes group small metabolites synthesized at high intracellular (mM) to reg...

Alkaline salts (e.g., NaHCO3 and Na2CO3) causes more severe morphological and physiological damage to plants than neutral salts (e.g., NaCl and Na2SO4) due to differences in pH. The mechanism by which plants respond to alkali stress is not fully understood, especially in plants having symbotic relationships such as alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.). Therefore, a study was designed to evaluate the me...

The phloem network is as essential for plants as the vascular system is for humans. This network, assembled by nucleus- and vacuole-free interconnected living cells, represents a long distance transport pathway for nutrients and information. According to the Münch hypothesis, osmolytes such as sucrose generate the hydrostatic pressure that drives nutrient and water flow between the source and t...

Methylated urea and sugar are chaotropic and kosmotropic osmolytes, respectively. In the present work, we have investigated the specific anion effect on the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) behavior of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) in the presence of methylated urea or sugars. Differential scanning calorimetry studies revealed that tetramethylurea can adsorb onto the PNIPAM sur...

Understanding how plants tolerate dehydration is a prerequisite for developing novel strategies for improving drought tolerance. The desiccation-tolerant (DT) Sporobolus stapfianus and the desiccation-sensitive (DS) Sporobolus pyramidalis formed a sister group contrast to reveal adaptive metabolic responses to dehydration using untargeted global metabolomic analysis. Young leaves from both gras...

We study the solvation of amino acids in pure-osmolyte and mixed-osmolyte urea and trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) solutions using molecular dynamics simulations. Analysis of Kirkwood-Buff integrals between the solution components provides evidence that in the mixed osmolytic solution, both urea and TMAO are mutually excluded from the amino acid surface, accompanied by an increase in osmolyte-osm...