Secret of how plants regulate their vitamin C production revealed

A QUT scientist has helped unravel the way in which plants regulate their levels of vitamin C, the vitamin essential for preventing iron deficiency anemia and conditions such as scurvy. 

Professor Roger Hellens, working with Dr William Laing from New Zealand's Plant and Food Research, has discovered the mechanism plants use to regulate the levels of vitamin C in each of their cells in response to the environment.

"Understanding these mechanisms may help in plant breeding programs to produce hardier plant crops and improve human health because iron deficiency anemia is the most common form of malnutrition worldwide," Professor Hellens, from QUT's Institute of Future Environments.

"This discovery will also help us to understand why some plants such as the Kakadu plum are able to accumulate super-high levels of vitamin C. Vitamin C is important in our diet because it enables more iron, which carries oxygen to our cells, to be taken up and absorbed. We humans gradually lost the ability to produce our own vitamin C thousands of years ago because it was so abundant in our hominid ancestors' largely fruit diet." "As we know, fruit can be higher in vitamin C than leafy vegetables so we can now study why fruit is so high and why some fruits make huge amounts."

Professor Hellens said plants responded to factors in the environment like extreme light or drought by producing vitamin C, a powerful antioxidant, to protect themselves from damage.