Abstract
Plants monitor wavelength, fluence and timing of light irradiation in order to adjust their development and reproduction to the seasonal and daily changes of environment. In the early 20th century botanists were already aware that development and reproduction in plants are influenced significantly by light (Klebs 1910). Evidence for photoregulation in plants so accumulated that Mohr (1962) operationally classified light-dependent reactions in plants into two categories, low and high energy reactions; the former reaction was induced by a pulse of light irradiation, whereas the latter required a continuous irradiation for long period of time. The former was further divided into low irradiance response and very low irradiance response in terms of light energy required and photoreversibility of effects by Blaauw et al (1968). Later, Briggs et al (1984) renamed them as very low fluence response (VLFR), low fluence response (LFR) and high irradiance response (HIR). As far as photoreceptor pigments for these three categories of photoperception in plants were concerned, it had been an open question for long time except that phytochrome was believed as the photoreceptor for red/far-red reversible LFR. Red/far-red reversible LFR (Borthwick et al 1952) was consistent with the photoreversible spectral changes of phytochrome between red light absorbing form, Pr, and far-red light absorbing form, Pfr (Butler et al 1959). The central dogma for phytochrome action that Pfr is only the active form was long supported by workers in this field, but evidence has accumulated against the dogma (Smith 1983).
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Furuya, M. (2001). Differential Perception of Environmental Light by Phytochromes. In: Sopory, S.K., Oelmüller, R., Maheshwari, S.C. (eds) Signal Transduction in Plants. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1365-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1365-0_1
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