Lipids differentially degraded during tissue freezing and thawing

摘要

Plants cope with freezing and thawing by altering the lipid composition of their cell membranes. Such cellular responses go through three phases - cold acclimation, freezing and post-freezing recovery. Lipid changes during the first two phases have been well studied, but those of the third phase are poorly understood. LI Weiqi from the CAS Kunming Institute of Botany and co-workers found that lipids are differently degraded and that two types of enzymatic phospholipase D (PLD) have important but opposite roles.