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Cellular Water and Anhydrobiosis in Plants

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“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” Herman Hess, “Siddhartha”.

Abstract

Anhydrobiosis is a well-known phenomenon represented in a range of plant, animal and microbial taxa. It is a unique faculty of some organisms to survive in the absence of even traceable water in their cells. As water is essential for life and unequivocally important for all the biological reactions and molecular integrity of cellular components, surviving without water is nature’s toughest puzzle. Initial research in this direction to understand the overall mechanism and dynamics of cellular water was done several decades ago with primary focus on characterizing cellular water at different intensities of dehydration using biophysical tools that lead to the establishment (/development) of a correlation of water-binding ability of cell constituents with the extent of anhydrobiosis. Unfortunately, in due course, the research focus had gradually changed and lost this initial direction. We believe a precise characterization of cellular water during dehydrated conditions is still pertinent in the current era of multidisciplinary research. Here cellular water characterized employing biophysical tools can be very precisely correlated with ongoing metabolic activities and other molecular regulatory events that in turn help in characterizing anhydrobiosis. This review intends to revive earlier approaches that were used to characterize the state of cellular water. This could help modern research in anhydrobiosis to correlate ongoing molecular events and/or adaptations during any change in the hydration level very precisely with the particular state of cell water.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by a grant from the Department of Biotechnology, India, as a part of a Ramalingaswami fellowship to BST.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110067, India

    Vivek Ambastha & Budhi Sagar Tiwari

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  1. Vivek Ambastha
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  2. Budhi Sagar Tiwari
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Correspondence to Budhi Sagar Tiwari.

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Ambastha, V., Tiwari, B.S. Cellular Water and Anhydrobiosis in Plants. J Plant Growth Regul 34, 665–671 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-015-9497-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-015-9497-6

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