Nature+1！我校理工学院Aloysius Wong团队论文被国际权威期刊收录
当你看到蛇时，你是不是立马退缩？人为何能如此快速地对危险作出反应？其实是激素发挥的作用。然而，许多激素无法穿过细胞膜。那么，激素如何与细胞膜结合产生应激作用呢？
黄博士团队近期发表的论文
而这便引起了温肯理工学院黄启恒 (Aloysius Wong)教授的研究兴趣。他的研究领域主要集中于植物细胞信号、人工照明的可持续园艺以及益生菌与抗生素耐药性等。近日，Aloysius Wong教授与学术副校长杨毅欣、迟玮、于佳、毕楚韵、田雪晨、意大利佩鲁贾大学教授Chris Gehring在国际权威期刊《Nature Plants》上发表了文章《植物腺苷酸环化酶已进入完整循环（Plant adenylate cyclases have come full circle）》，影响因子达18。《Nature Plants》是植物科学领域顶尖期刊之一，属于《Nature》子刊，是《Nature》期刊推出的首个专注于植物学各领域优秀研究成果的期刊。
理工学院代理院长兼生物学副教授，他拥有阿卜杜拉科技大学生物科学博士学位，剑桥大学硕士学位，曾获得国家自然基金项目，浙江省自然科学基金委员会 — 青年基金项目。
入教温肯以来，Aloysius Wong 博士已先后在《 Nature Plants 》《Molecular Plant》《Plant Cell》《Plant Journal》《Bioinformatics》《Development》等国际顶级学术期刊上发表多篇论文。
在50年代中期，厄尔·萨瑟兰（Earl Sutherland）和同事们注意到，当肝脏与肾上腺素一起孵育时，肝脏细胞膜会释放出一种化学物质，这种物质后来被确定为环磷酸腺苷（cAMP），它能激活细胞内的酶，如导致血液中葡萄糖释放的糖原磷酸化酶。正是这一发现使他于1971年获得了诺贝尔生理学或医学奖。
环磷酸腺苷（cAMP）存在生物界的各个物种中，它是由一种称为腺苷酰环化酶（AC）的酶产生的。在植物中，环磷酸腺苷（cAMP）参与离子的吸收和稳态调节，调控细胞分裂和增殖、花粉管生长和重新定位、气孔开启以及能量代谢，但是产生它的酶，即腺苷酰环化酶（AC），一直未被发现。这一点让人感到惊讶，因为腺苷酰环化酶（AC）已在几乎所有其他物种中被发现，并且它们高度保守。
黄博士与学生在实验中
如果环磷酸腺苷（cAMP）在植物中扮演着如此重要的角色，那么产生它的酶在哪里呢？
Aloysius Wong团队认为植物中的腺苷酰环化酶(AC)具有“兼职”功能，即调节蛋白质内部和之间的其他结构域的活动，从而提供一种动态调整的信号强度，例如细胞特定区域的cAMP（时空调节）。这种微观调控能力对于植物等固着生物尤为关键，因为它们需要不断地对环境条件做出反应和适应，而移动生物如动物则可以通过物理移动来实现适应。
早在之前，Aloysius Wong团队的另一篇论文还被核心期刊《Molecular Plant》收录，影响因子高达27.5。其中详细阐述了这一发现的意义。近日，他的团队在《Nature Plants》上进行了进一步的分析和更新，这将指导该领域的研究方向。
2022年黄博士团队在《Molecular Plant》上发表的论文
生长素途径已经保持不变了近15年，对于许多经典的植物激素也是如此。如果不能完全理解植物细胞的信号传导途径，科学家将无法设计出有效的作物改良策略。因此，黄博士团队的研究对于实现这样高影响力的发现至关重要，这些发现不仅改变我们对植物生长和应答的理解方式，还将为生物技术创新提供新的目标，从而提高作物产量并增强作物对环境胁迫的耐受性，从而有助于食品安全和可持续食品生产。
于是，黄博士团队花费了十多年的时间开发了一种发现植物腺苷酰环化酶（ACs）的方法。
植物中由ACs和cAMP介导的分子和生理过程
他们成功地发现了许多新的ACs，重要的是，他们的方法最近被全球几个研究团队所应用。例如奥地利的Jiri Friml小组在Nature上最近发表的文章中就发现了一个有趣的AC，它在已被充分研究的TIR1/AFB生长素受体中具有“兼职”功能。在中国，河南农业大学小麦玉米作物科学国家重点实验室和河北农业大学中国枣研究中心的研究人员最近应用了他们的方法，成功地在作物和经济作物中如玉米、枣、苹果和梨中发现了ACs，这些ACs参与了植物生长和发育的基本过程，例如种子萌发、生根、开花和昼夜节律等，同时还参与了植物对温度和病原体等环境胁迫的应答。
黄博士实验室的植物生理实验
温肯生物技术科学在读研究生于佳、迟玮和科研助理毕楚韵纷纷表示，在参与此项研究的过程中，他们对学术写作有更清楚的概念，通过大量阅读文献并进行信息归纳，学习科研文章中图例的绘制，虽然繁杂的数据和大量的文献都给他们带来了不小的挑战，但是在黄博士的指导下收获颇丰。目前，黄博士所在温州肯恩大学实验室正在研究新型“兼职”蛋白质，其中几种蛋白质影响气孔关闭、根系结构和花粉管生长，同时还在阐明它们的分子调控和细胞途径。他欢迎对植物生物学充满热情、对科研积极探索的学生与他联系，共同寻求研究机会。
Latest Release! Dr. Aloysius Wong's Team Publishes an Article in Nature Plants
Recently, Professor Aloysius Wong and colleagues from the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology, published two articles at authoritative journals with impact factor 18 and 27.5, respectively. Here, he briefly describes the content of these articles.
Many essential functions of our body are regulated by hormones. For instance, when we are confronted by a snake, our “fight-or-flight” response is activated through epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) which is a hormone that mobilizes glucose in the blood and causing the heart to beat faster. As a result, we can react quickly to dangerous situations.
However, many hormones cannot pass through the cell membrane. So, how does the binding of a hormone to the plasma membrane change the activity of enzymes in the cell?
In the mid-1950s, Earl Sutherland and his colleagues noticed that a chemical substance is released by the membranes of liver when incubated with epinephrine. This substance was later identified as cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). It activates enzymes within the cell such as glycogen phosphorylase causing a release of glucose in the blood. This discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1971.
Today, we know that cAMP is involved in many biochemical processes, including the regulation of glycogen, sugar, and lipid metabolism. cAMP is known as a “second messenger” because it relays the signals from hormones, which are the “first messengers” at the surface of the cell, to enzymes and other proteins in the cell.
cAMP exists in organisms across the tree of life and is produced by an enzyme known as adenylate cyclase (AC). In plants, cAMP is involved in ion uptake and homeostasis, and regulates cell division and proliferation, pollen tube growth and reorientation, stomatal opening, and energy metabolism, but the enzyme that produces it, the AC, was undiscovered. This is surprising because ACs have been found in almost all species and they are highly conserved.
“If cAMP plays such important role in plants, then where is the enzyme that generates it?”, asked Dr. Wong. The convenient answer to this question would be that ACs are just not present in plants, but Dr. Wong argues otherwise. Just because they are unfound, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Dr. Wong believes that plant ACs are just different from those in animals, bacteria, and fungi, thus can not be identified through regular homology approaches. Dr. Wong predicts that the ACs in plants could have undergone extensive divergent evolution, retaining only the key amino acids at the catalytic site. Moreover, to be more efficient, plant ACs may have been integrated into much larger proteins with other primary functions such as ion transport and hormone perception. As such, plant ACs are thought to have a “moonlighting” function where they tune the activities of other domains within and between proteins, thus offering a way to dynamically adjust the signal strength e.g., cAMP, at specific regions of the cell (spatiotemporal regulation). This kind of micro-regulation ability is even more crucial for sessile organisms such as plants, as they need to continuously respond and adapt to environmental conditions whereas mobile organisms such as animals could just physically move.
Dr. Wong and his colleagues have spent more than 10 years developing innovative methods to discover plant ACs. They have successfully discovered many new ACs and importantly, their methods have been recently applied by several research groups around the world as exemplified in a recent publication in Nature, by Jiri Friml’s group in Austria, who somewhat unexpectedly, identified an AC that is moonlighting within the well-characterized TIR1/AFB auxin receptors [1]. This AC mediates auxin dependent root growth and gravitropic response. In China, researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Wheat & Maize Crop Science, Henan Agricultural University, and the Research Center of Chinese Jujube, Hebei Agricultural University, have recently applied our method and successfully found ACs in crops and economically important plants such as maize, jujube, apple and pear, where the ACs were shown to be involved in fundamental plant growth and development such as seed germination, root growth, flowering and circadian rhythm, as well as plant responses to environmental stresses such as heat and pathogens [2,3].
Dr. Wong’s team at WKU detailed the significance of this finding in Molecular Plant [IF: 27.5] in 2022 [4], and in September this year, his team provided further analysis and update in Nature Plants [IF: 18] which will guide the direction of research in this field [5]. Dr. Wong explained that the auxin pathway has been unchanged for almost 15 years and the same is true for many classical plant hormones. Without the complete understanding of the signaling pathways in plant cells, scientists can not design effective strategies for crop improvements. Therefore, the contribution of Dr. Wong’s team was crucial to enable such high impact discoveries which will not only change the way we understand about plant growth and responses, but also generate new targets for biotechnological innovations that will increase crop yield and tolerance to environmental stresses, thus contributing to food security and sustainable food production.
Although both publications were led by Dr. Wong, WKU graduate students Chi Wei and Yu Jia, his research assistant Chuyun Bi as well as Xuechen Tian who is currently completing his doctorate at University of Malaya, and WKU Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Dr. Yang Yixin, have contributed significantly to the articles. They diligently collected data, performed data analysis, and generated the figures and tables, for the articles.
Dr. Wong’s lab at WKU is currently characterizing novel moonlighting proteins several of which affect stomata closing, root architecture and pollen tube growth, while also delineating their molecular regulations and cellular pathways. He invites highly motivated students who are passionate about making exciting discoveries and with interest in plant biology, to contact him to explore research opportunities in his group.
代表性文章：
[1] Qi L, Kwiatkowski M, Chen H, Hoermayer L, Sinclair S, et al. (2022). Adenylate cyclase activity of TIR1/AFB auxin receptors in plants. Nature 611(7934), 133-138.
[2] Yang H, Zhao Y, Chen N, Liu Y, Yang S, Du H, et al. (2021). A new adenylyl cyclase, putative disease-resistance RPP13-like protein 3, participates in abscisic acid-mediated resistance to heat stress in maize. Journal of Experimental Botany 72(2), 283-301.
[3] Liu Z, Yuan Y, Wang L, Zhao X, Wang L, Wang L, et al. (2023). Three novel adenylate cyclase genes show significant biological functions in plant. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 71(2), 1149-1161.
[4] Wong A*, Chi W, Yu J, Bi C, Tian X, Yang Y & Gehring C (2022). Plant adenylate cyclases have come full circle. Nature Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01486-x.
[5] Wong A, Tian X, Yang Y & Gehring C (2022). Adenylate cyclase activity of TIR1/AFB links cAMP to auxin-dependent responses. Molecular Plant 15(12), 1838-1840.
文字丨Aloysius Wong 博士团队 王智耀
一审 | 项温蔚
二审 | 王舒
三审 | 吕卓环
责编 | 媒体中心