For people, plants can seem like aliens. Movements are typically slow, and many consider plants “slow and low life [sLow life]” (Hangarter, 2009). Their appearance and behavior are so different from our- selves that we are in awe when we learn that many of the central functions of plants and humans are encoded by highly conserved genes. For example at the core of metabo- lism, hexokinase, the enzyme that phos- phorylates incoming glucose, and many of the proteins that transport glucose look strikingly similar. This similarity goes yet deeper, as hexokinase has two distinct func- tions both as an enzyme and as a sensor (“sensyme”), a duality that appears to be conserved from plants to fungi to animals (Frommer et al., 2003).
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