Industrial chicory, Cichorium intybus L., is cultivated for the production of inulin. Most varieties of industrial chicory exhibit rather poor early growth, which limits further yield improvements in their European cultivation area. The poor early growth could be due to suboptimum adaptation of the gene pool to growth at low temperatures, sometimes in combination with high light intensities, which is typical of early-spring mornings. We have used chlorophyll (Chl) a fluorescence to evaluate the response of young plants of the cultivar 'Hera' to low temperatures and high light intensities. Plants were grown at three temperatures: 16°C (reference), 8°C (intermediate), and 4°C (cold stress). Light-response measurements were carried out at different light intensities in combination with different measurement temperatures. Parameters that quantify the photosystem II (PSII) operating efficiency (including PSII maximum efficiency and PSII efficiency factor) and nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ) are important to evaluate the stress in terms of severity, the photosynthetics processes affected, and acclimation to lower growth temperatures. The results clearly demonstrate that in young industrial chicory plants the photosynthetic system adapts to lower growth temperatures. However, to fully understand the plant response to the stresses studied and to evaluate the long-term effect of the stress applied on the growth dynamics, the subsequent dark relaxation dynamics should also be investigated. and S. Devacht ... [et al.].
Early light-induced proteins (ELIPs) are nuclear-encoded thylakoid proteins. In the present research, two full-length cDNAs (741 and 815 bp), encoding ELIPs (190 and 175 aa) and their genomic sequences, were isolated from tea leaves, and named CsELIP1 and CsELIP2, respectively. Both the deduced CsELIPs contain a chloroplast transit peptide in the N-terminus and a chlorophyll a/b binding protein motif with three transmembrane helices in the C-terminus. The genomic sequences of the two CsELIPs conform to the three-exon pattern of ELIP genomic sequences of other plant species. However, the identities between two CsELIPs and ACJ09655 from gymnosperm species were higher than all of
ELIP-like proteins identified from other angiosperms. Expression analysis showed that the two CsELIP genes were significantly
up-regulated when the photoinhibition occurred in tea leaves, implying that they might be involved in photoprotection., X. W. Li ... [et al.]., and Obsahuje bibliografii