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History and Insights

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Light Sensing in Plants

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Abstract

Human beings have always relied on plants to provide their staple foods and raw materials for diverse tools, and since prehistoric times must have known that sunlight greatly influences plant development and reproduction. From the Renaissance onwards, careful observations of nature led to a growing awareness that both higher and lower plants respond variously to light in terms of irradiation dosage for photosynthesis, direction for phototropism, timing and duration for photoperiodism, and wavelengths for photomorphogenesis. [Joseph Priestley (1772)] discovered that green plants utilize light as their source of energy for the production of complex organic substances. Julius Sachs (1864) demonstrated that only the blue region of visible light resulted in phototropic bending of plants. [Charles Darwin and his son (1881)] carried out a pioneering experiment on lightsignal transduction of phototropism, in which they separated the photoreceptive site from the responding growth region in monocot seedlings. In 1910, Georg Klebs gathered a lot of evidence that the environmental light greatly influences growth and development of seed plants and ferns. However, the molecular basis of light perception and signal transduction in plants was not elucidated until quite recently.

Retired, the University of Tokyo in 1987, Riken Frontier Research Program in 1992, and Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory in 2001 (see Furuya 2004)

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  1. 6-2-10 Kugahara, Ota-ku, Tokyo, 146-0085, Japan

    Masaki Furuya

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  1. Department of Biology, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo, 192-0397, Japan

    Masamitsu Wada Dr.

  2. Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Kyushu University, Ropponmatsu, Fukuoka, 810-8560, Japan

    Ken-ichiro Shimazaki Dr.

  3. Botanical Gardens, Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, 2000 Kisaichi, Katano, Osaka, 576-0004, Japan

    Moritoshi Iino Ph.D.

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© 2005 Yamada Science Foundation and Springer-Verlag Tokyo

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Furuya, M. (2005). History and Insights. In: Wada, M., Shimazaki, Ki., Iino, M. (eds) Light Sensing in Plants. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-27092-2_1

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