Advances in BOTANICAL RESEARCH VOLUME 7 This Page Intentionally Left Blank Advances in BOTANICAL RESEARCH Edited by H. W. WOOLHOUSE Department of Plant Sciences, The University, Leeds, England VOLUME 7 1979 ACADEMIC PRESS London New York Toronto Sydney San Francisco A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers ACADEMIC PRESS INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24/28 Oval Road, London NWl 7DX US.Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS INC. 111 Fifth Avenue New York. New York 10003 Copyright 0 1979 by Academic Press Inc. (London) Ltd All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by photostat, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Advances in botanical research. Vol. 7 1. Botany I. Woolhouse, Harold William 581 QK45.2 62-21 144 ISBN 0-12-005907-X Printed in Great Britain by Latimer Trend & Company Ltd, Plymouth CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 7 J. ARDITTI, Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California 92717, U.S.A. W. ARMSTRONG, Department of Plant Biology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7 R X , England P. F . BROWNELL, Department of Botany, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, Queensland, Australia R. DOUCE, Laboratoire de Biologie VPge‘tale, Commissariat ci I’Energie Atomique, Centre d’ Etudes Nucleaires de Grenoble, 85 X , 38041 Grenoble Cedex, France J. JOYARD, Laboratoire de Biologie Vkgitale, Commissariat Ci I’Energie Atomique, Centre #Etudes Nucleaires de Grenoble, 85 X , 38041 Grenoble Cedex, France A. D. M. RAYNER, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7 A Y , England N. K . TODD, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Exeter, Hatherly Laboratories, Prince of Wales Road, Exeter EX4 4PS, England V This Page Intentionally Left Blank PREFACE During the past decade progress has been made in the matter of separating and characterizing the various types of membranes which occur in plant cells. The subject is still very much in its infancy, however, and can perhaps best be put in perspective by considering the fact that more work has been published on the erythrocyte membrane than all the types of plant cell membranes put together. In this volume Douce provides an introduction to the study of chloroplast envelope membranes and supplies fascinating evidence of their complex structure and diverse functions. In 1959 Brownell provided the first definitive evidence that sodium was an essential element for the growth of a flowering plant, Atriplex vesicaria. Subsequent work revealed a situation unique in the mineral nutrition of higher plants, in that sodium was shown to be essential for some species but not others. Brownell and his group went on to show that species possessing the C , pathway of photosynthesis are the ones which require sodium. In this volume Brownell gives an account of this technically exacting line of work and goes on to discuss the recent work from his group which suggests that to understand the biochemistry of sodium action in C , species is likely to prove a difficult problem. Armstrong discusses the development of an electrical analogue model used to solve quantitative problems in the internal movements of oxygen in wetland plants and casts doubt on some of the recent work purporting to show biochemical adaptation to growth under anaerobic conditions. This is the type of study which encourages the hope that physiological work of a good standard is at last infiltrating the field of experimental ecology. Again within the context of a more rigorous analytical ecology, Todd