Abstract
To examine the chilling tolerance lipids, we compared the chilling susceptibility of photosystem II of wild type tobacco plants with that of transgenic tobacco plants, in which the sensitivity to chilling had been enhanced by genetic modification of fatty acid unsaturation of chloroplast membrane lipids. The transgenic tobacco plants were found to contain reduced levels of unsaturated membrane fatty acids by being tansformed with cDNA for glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase from squash. For the purpose of studying on the functional integrity of photosystem II during low-temperature photoinhibition, the photochemical efficiency was measured as the ration of the maximun fluorescence of chlorophyll (Fv/Fm) of photosystem II. In parallel with an investigation on the transgenic plants, susceptibility of chilling-resistant species, such as spinah and pea, and of chilling-sensitive ones, such as squash and sweet potato, to low-temperature photoinhibition was also compared in terms of room temperature-induced chlorophyll fluorescence from photosystem II. When leaf disks from the two genotypes of tobacco plants were exposed to light at 5$^{\circ}C$, the transgenic plants showed more rapid decline in photochemical activity of photosysytme II than wild-type plants. When they were pretreated with lincomycin, an inhibitor of chloroplast-encoded protein synthesis, the extent of photoinhibition was even more accelerated. More impottantly, they showed a comparable extent of photoinhibition in the presence of lincomycin, making a clear contrast to the discrepancy observed in the discrepancy observed in the absence of lincomycin. Restoration of Fv/Fm during recovery from low-temperature photoinhibition occurred more slowly in the transgenic tobacco plants than the wild-type. These findings are discussed in relation to fatty acid unsaturation of membrane phosphatidylglycerol. It appears that the ability of plants to rapidly regenerate the active photosystem II complex from might explain, in part, why chilling-resistant plants can toleratlow-temperature photoinhibition.