Jason Treberg discusses the impact of Paul Yancey et al.'s classic paper 'Living with water stress: evolution of osmolyte systems', published in Science in 1982. Occasionally a hypothesis comes along that is so broadly applicable to biological systems that it borders on being universal. Even less frequent is when the hypothesis involves linking knowledge from almost a century before with recent...

In aquatic invertebrates such as molluscs, not equipped with advanced mechanisms for regulating their internal environment, osmotic adaptation at a cellular level using an ‘osmolyte system’ plays an essential role. This osmotic adaptation involves accumulation and quantitative regulation of a large amount of organic solutes called ‘osmolytes’ in the intracellular space, to enable cells to respo...

Change in catalase activity was examined in leaves of rice plant exposed to salinity. Depending on the method of preparation of crude protein extract from leaf and the constituents of the assay medium, a significant difference in enzyme activity was recorded. Inclusion of sorbitol or mannitol or sucrose in the extraction and enzyme assay medium enhanced the enzyme activity in salt-stressed samp...

Osmolytes are a class of compounds ubiquitously used by living organisms to respond to cellular stress or to fine-tune molecular properties in the cell. These compounds are also highly useful in vitro. In this chapter, we give an overview of the possible uses of osmolytes in the laboratory, and how we can investigate and understand their modes of action. Experimental procedures are discussed wi...