The multifarious role of callose and callose synthase in plant development and environment interactions

Ning Li; Zeng Lin; Peiyao Yu; Yanling Zeng; Shenxiu Du; Li-Jun Huang

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1183402

The multifarious role of callose and callose synthase in plant development and environment interactions

Front Plant Sci. 2023 May 31:14:1183402. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1183402. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Ning Li^{1

2}, Zeng Lin¹, Peiyao Yu¹, Yanling Zeng¹, Shenxiu Du³, Li-Jun Huang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Cultivation and Protection for Non-Wood Forest Trees, College of Forestry, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha, China.
² Key Laboratory of Forest Bio-resources and Integrated Pest Management for Higher Education in Hunan Province, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha, China.
³ Biotechnology Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Callose is an important linear form of polysaccharide synthesized in plant cell walls. It is mainly composed of β-1,3-linked glucose residues with rare amount of β-1,6-linked branches. Callose can be detected in almost all plant tissues and are widely involved in various stages of plant growth and development. Callose is accumulated on plant cell plates, microspores, sieve plates, and plasmodesmata in cell walls and is inducible upon heavy metal treatment, pathogen invasion, and mechanical wounding. Callose in plant cells is synthesized by callose synthases located on the cell membrane. The chemical composition of callose and the components of callose synthases were once controversial until the application of molecular biology and genetics in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana that led to the cloning of genes encoding synthases responsible for callose biosynthesis. This minireview summarizes the research progress of plant callose and its synthetizing enzymes in recent years to illustrate the important and versatile role of callose in plant life activities.

Keywords: callose; cell wall; glucan-synthase-like; plant-pathogen interaction; plasmodesmata.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Training Program for Excellent Young Innovators of Changsha (kq2009016), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31901345), Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2021JJ31141 and 2020JJ5970), the Education Department of Hunan Province (20A517 and 22B0260), and Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project (CX20210885).