INTRODUCTIONAquaporins are small integral membrane pro-teins that belong to the ancient family of major intrinsic proteins (MIPs), with mem-bers in animals, microbes, and plants. Fifteen years after their discovery in plants, it now appears that studies on aquaporins have pro-vided unique perspectives into multiple in-tegrated aspects of plant biology. Aquapor-ins first raised considerable interest because of their water channel activity. This finding was unexpected in plants and, although it may not have induced a real paradigm shift in understanding of membrane water transport (124, 140), it led researchers to revisit many aspects of plant water relations and to link these aspects to novel physiological contexts. More recently, MIPs were proved to be more than water channels (141), and other transport substrates of great physiological significance have been identified. Although the term aquaporin was ini-tially restricted to water-transporting MIPs, we now use this term in a broader sense, re-ferring to all plant MIPs as aquaporins. The molecular and cellular properties of aquapor-ins were recently reviewed in detail (18, 91). The aim of the present review is to examine how a wide range of selectivity profiles and regulation properties allows aquaporins to be integrated in numerous functions throughout plant development and during adaptations to variable environmental conditions.MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR PROPERTIESThe Plant Aquaporin FamilySubfamilies. Plant aquaporins show a high multiplicity of isoforms, with 35 and 33 ho-mologs in Arabidopsis and rice, respectively (62, 113, 120). On the basis of sequence ho-mology, aquaporins in most plant species can be divided into four subgroups. The plasma membrane intrinsic proteins (PIP) (with two phylogenic subgroups, PIP1 and PIP2, and 13 isoforms in Arabidopsis) and the tono-plast intrinsic proteins (TIP) (10 homologs in Arabidopsis) are the most abundant aqua-porins in the plasma membrane and vacuolar membrane (tonoplast), respectively (62, 113). The third subfamily comprises the nodulin-26–like intrinsic membrane proteins (NIPs), which were named after soybean (Glycine max) nodulin-26 (GmNOD26), an abundant aqua-porin expressed in the peribacteroid mem-brane of N2 -fixing symbiotic root nodules. NIPs are also present in nonlegume plant species (9 homologs in Arabidopsis) (149). A fourth class comprises small basic intrinsic proteins (SIPs) (3 homologs in Arabidopsis) (56, 62, 113). Although these four classes are conserved among all plant species, the aquaporin gene family shows signs of rapid and recent evolution and orthologs cannot necessarily be distinguished between species (120). In addition, some plant species have ac-quired additional, novel types of aquaporins. For instance, a homolog of the bacterial glyc-erol facilitator GlpF has been acquired by the moss Physcomitrella patens by horizontal gene transfer (45), and the genome of this organ-ism and some higher plants (such as poplar) encodes a fifth class of aquaporins, which are closely related to but yet clearly distinct from PIPs (139; U. Johanson, personal communi-cation).
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