Abstract
Chlorophyll (Chl) breakdown is a diagnostic visual process of leaf senescence, which furnishes phyllobilins (PBs) by the PAO/phyllobilin pathway. As Chl breakdown disables photosynthesis, it appears to have no role in photoactive green leaves. Here, colorless PBs were detected in green, non-senescent leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana. The PBs from the green leaves had structures entirely consistent with the PAO/phyllobilin pathway and the mutation of a single Chl catabolic enzyme completely abolished PBs with the particular modification. Hence, the PAO/phyllobilin pathway was active in the absence of visible senescence and expression of genes encoding Chl catabolic enzymes was observed in green Arabidopsis leaves. PBs accumulated to only sub-% amounts compared to the Chls present in the green leaves, excluding a substantial contribution of Chl breakdown from rapid Chl turnover associated with photosystem II repair. Indeed, Chl turnover was shown to involve a Chl a dephytylation and Chl a reconstitution cycle. However, non-recyclable pheophytin a is also liberated in the course of photosystem II repair, and is proposed here to be scavenged and degraded to the observed PBs. Hence, a cryptic form of the established pathway of Chl breakdown is indicated to play a constitutive role in photoactive leaves.
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This work was supported by Austrian Science Fund (FWF, Project P-28522 to B.K.) and the Swiss National Foundation (Project 31003A_172977 to S.H.).
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Interestingly, Karg et al. (2019) very recently reported the occurrence of phyllobilins in extracts of green leaves of Echinacea purpurea.
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Süssenbacher, I., Menghini, D., Scherzer, G. et al. Cryptic chlorophyll breakdown in non-senescent green Arabidopsis thaliana leaves. Photosynth Res 142, 69–85 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-019-00649-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-019-00649-2