Five years ago, researchers from the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) led by the CSIC Research Professor Paloma Mas made the breakthrough discovery that the circadian clocks in the growing tip of the plant shoot function in a similar way to the clocks in the mammalian brain, which in both cases are able to synchronize the daily rhythms of the cells in distal organs. From that seminal finding, plant researchers have been eager to discover the messenger molecule that could travel from the shoot to the root to orchestrate the rhythms. The answer has been published in Nature Plants by Paloma Mas’ team and collaborators from Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. They have identified a small essential clock protein called ELF4 as the required messenger. Furthermore, through a series of ingenious experiments, the researchers discovered that the movement of this molecule is sensitive to the ambient temperature.
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Source: Phys.org