Figure 1.

Protective effects of cold-induced saccharides at the subcellular level. The figure highlights the (putative) action sites of sugars accumulating during CS responses in higher plants cells. The grey dotted line refers to the proposed vesicular transport mechanism of fructans from the vacuole to the plasma membrane in fructan accumulating species (Valluru et al., 2008). The green dotted line refers to the possible roles of anthocyanins in CS protection. Anthocyanins are also imported in the vacuole through ABC class transporters (Francisco et al., 2013), where they can contribute in alleviating CS. The blue arrow represents the signaling pathway leading to the activation of CBFs. The biosynthesis and metabolic conversions of the sugars involved is oversimplified and represented by grey arrows. CBFs, C-repeat binding factors; GAs, gibberellins; GAox, GA oxidase; GolS, galactinol synthase; βAM, β-amylase; Suc, sucrose. Specific effects of different sugars/anthocyanins are highlighted in italic. Readers are referred to the figure legend and the text for further details.