How plant creates anticancer compounds revealed

Posted by Caroline on March 30th, 2016

Plants are basically stationary, so to protect themselves from insects, wild animals, and diseases, they make a self-defense system of chemical compounds known as secondary metabolites. The greater part of these compounds are stored in the vacuoles of plant cells, and activate if an animal eats the plant. People have a long history of utilizing these metabolites as both medicines and stimulants: which include nicotine and caffeine.

Catharanthus roseus (rosy periwinkle) is a plant that creates organic compounds used to treat cancer, arrhythmia, and other medical conditions. A Japanese research team has uncovered the details of the metabolism process for these compounds on a cellular level. Their information recommends the presence of an unknown mechanism which regulates the creation, development and distribution of compounds within plants.

The scientists analyzed Catharanthus roseus, a plant well known for creating the antitumor compounds classified as terpenoid indole alkaloids (TIAs). During the procedure for metabolizing TIAs, different intermediary compounds are created and travel across different cells, and in the end arriving at the idioblast or laticifer cells where they are stored. Up to now, it was still unknown how each compound moved between cells, and how their creation and storage was controlled within each cell.

By using imaging mass spectrometry for the tissue and single-cell mass spectrometry for individual cells, the team analyzed the cellular distribution of each compound within the tissue. This uncovered, in addition to other things, that the compounds previously expected to have been metabolized and stored in the epidermal cells were in fact present in huge numbers in a totally different location-idioblast cells.

These discoveries propose the likelihood of an unknown mechanism that manages the creation, movement and regulation of organic compounds within plants, having the potentiality to develop new methods for synthesizing organic compounds.

Edited by Creative BioMart.