The plant dehydrin Lti30 stabilizes lipid lamellar structures in varying hydration conditions
Jenny Andersson, Quoc Dat Pham, Helena Mateos, Sylvia Eriksson, Pia Harryson, Emma Sparr
Abstract
Plants regularly experience osmotic stress that can be caused by drying, freezing, or exposure to aqueous or soil systems with high salt content. Changes in osmotic pressure can lead to changes in biomolecular self-assembled structures, including changes in protein conformation, transformations between different membrane structures, and swelling of multilayer systems. All of these structural changes may have major consequences on biological functions. One example of dehydration-induced changes is found in rye leaves, in which the osmotic stress has been proposed to cause a phase change from planar bilayers to a reversed hexagonal phase in the cell plasma membranes, which may in turn lead to massive leakage and cell injury (1, 2). Another relevant example is dehydration-induced phase segregation and domain formation in cell membranes, which has also been associated with increased membrane permeability (3).