20/03/2026
When plants transitioned from the life in water to a life on land, they were exposed to a whole new set of environmental stressors, which can cause mutations in the DNA.
However, to prevent these mutations from being introduced into proteins, land plants have evolved an impressive way to work around this issue: Using so-called Pentatricopeptide Repeat (PPR) proteins, they can edit their RNA to restore codons that encode for important amino acids (Knoop 2023; Meng et al. 2024). This phenomenon has been observed in the organelles, namely the mitochondrion and chloroplast of land plants, such as Selanigella moellendorfii (Hecht et al. 2011) or Physcomitrium patens (Rüdinger et al. 2009).
References:
Hecht, Julia; Grewe, Felix; Knoop, Volker (2011): Extreme RNA editing in coding islands and abundant microsatellites in repeat sequences of Selaginella moellendorffii mitochondria: the root of frequent plant mtDNA recombination in early tracheophytes. In: Genome Biol Evol 3, S. 344–358. DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evr027.
Knoop, Volker (2023): C-to-U and U-to-C: RNA editing in plant organelles and beyond. In: Journal of experimental botany 74 (7), S. 2273–2294. DOI: 10.1093/jxb/erac488.
Meng, Lingzhi; Du, Mengxue; Zhu, Taotao; Li, Gang; Ding, Yi; Zhang, Qiang (2024): PPR proteins in plants: roles, mechanisms, and prospects for rice research. In: Frontiers in plant science 15, S. 1416742. DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1416742.
Rüdinger, Mareike; Funk, Helena T.; Rensing, Stefan A.; Maier, Uwe G.; Knoop, Volker (2009): RNA editing: only eleven sites are present in the Physcomitrella patens mitochondrial transcriptome and a universal nomenclature proposal. In: Mol Genet Genomics 281 (5), S. 473–481. DOI: 10.1007/s00438-009-0424-z.
https://www.pflanzenforschung.de/de/pflanzenwissen/journal/einblick-340-millionen-jahre-evolution-1270
