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The importance of the TOR kinase growth regulator for seed development

The ability to monitor and respond to altered nutrient availability is important for all organisms but particularly so for plants where altered nutrient availability leads to different strategies for allocation of resources and altered patterns of growth and development. Plants are thought to monitor a range of nutrients including sugars, nitrate, and amino acids, both locally and over a distance and a number of specific sensing systems for each of these nutrients have been described. However, it has been unclear how the plant coordinates growth with the general availability of nutrients. A protein that appears to be important for this coordination is TOR kinase. It is a Ser/Thr protein kinase and its name stands for Target of Rapamycin, because it is specifically inhibited by Rapamycin, an antibiotic isolated from soil samples from Easter Island (Rapa Nui). The TOR kinase is highly conserved in all eukaryotes and is a positive regulator of growth in response to both carbonand nitrogencontaining nutrients. TOR knockouts are embryo lethal in Arabidopsis, emphasising its importance in embryo development and growth. TOR has recently been shown to play a crucial role in mediating sugar signals that activate the root apical meristem in the heterotrophic-to-autotrophic transition of early seedling growth (Xiong et al., 2013). In this highlighted article, Salem et al. (2017), set out to understand more about the role of TOR in seed development and germination. As Patrick Giavalisco, the lead author of the study, explains, they faced an immediate problem – the embryo lethal phenotype of TOR knockout mutants meant that they could not use the mutants to study the role of TOR in post-embryonic phases of plant growth. The alternative approach – inducible genetic repression of TOR transcription/translation using inducible RNAi or artificial micro RNA is also problematic: this approach either only partially represses TOR, generating only weak phenotypes or, if strong repression is achieved, is lethal. The other approach is to use rapamycin to inhibit