Review

Roles of plant soluble sugars and their responses to plant cold stress

Ma Yuanyuan¹, Zhang Yali¹, Lu Jiang¹*, Shao Hongbo^2,3,4

¹The College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing100083, China.

²State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yangling 712100, China.

³Shandong Key Laboratory of Eco-environmental Science for the Yellow River Delta, Binzhou University, Binzhou256603, China.

⁴Institute for Life Sciences, Qingdao University of Science & Technology (QUST), Qingdao266042, China.

*Correspondence author.  E-mail: shaohongbo@qust.edu.cn,  jiang.lu.cau@gmail.com.  Tel: 86 532 84023984.

Accepted 17 March, 2009

Plants can enhance freezing tolerance by gradual exposure to low temperature known as cold acclimation. Soluble sugars have been confirmed to play an important role during the process. This is based on the fact they are most commonly detected in various species of terrestrial plants that have undergone seasonal cold acclimation. Soluble sugars exert their positive effects to protect plant cells from damage caused by cold stress through many ways including serving as osmoprotectants, nutrients as well as interacting with the lipid bilayer. In addition to these functions, more focus is on their important hormone-like functions as primary messengers in signal transduction nowadays. On the other hand, higher sugar concentrations can trigger leaf senescence, which indicates that the accumulation of soluble sugars during cold acclimation might impact on plants negatively. Further study can be done to investigate the mechanisms by which soluble sugars are involved in the plants’ response to the cold signal by advanced molecular biology methodology to examine sugar-regulated gene expression under cold condition.

Key words: Plants, sugars, cold acclimation, signal transduction, biotechnology.