This is a major breakthrough that provides a completely new perspective on daily circadian rhythms.
Plant cells communicate information about the time of day to their chloroplasts, the part of their cells that underpins all agricultural productivity on Earth, researchers at the University of Bristol have demonstrated in a study published today in Science. Plant cells contain an internal clock (the circadian clock), which is able to regulate cellular processes so that they occur at the optimal time of day, causing a big increase in plant productivity. As chloroplasts are the site of photosynthesis, their function is highly dependent on the daily changes in light environment. It is thought that chloroplasts were originally free-living organisms that were incorporated into the cells of plants very early in plant evolutionary history. A result of this is that chloroplasts have retained some of the cellular machinery required to produce proteins from their own chloroplast DNA. An essential part of this machinery are 'sigma factors', and in present-day plants, they are encoded for by the cell's nuclear DNA. The researchers were able to show that the production of sigma factors is controlled by the plant's clock.
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