Fine-structural characterization of plant microbodies

Abstract

Morphology and distribution of the relatively less well known organelles of plants have been studied with the electron microscope in tissues fixed in glutaraldehyde and postfixed in osmium tetroxide. An organelle comparable morphologically to the animal microbody and similar to the plant microbody isolated by Mollenhauer et al. (1966) has been encountered in a variety of plant species and tissues, and has been studied particularly in bean and radish roots, oat coleoptiles, and tobacco roots, stems and callus. The organelle has variable shape and is 0.5 to 1.5 μ in the greatest diameter. It has a single bounding membrane, a granular to fibrillar matrix of variable electron density, and an intimate association with one or two cisternae of rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Microbodies are easily the most common and generally distributed of the less well characterized organelles of plant cells. It seems very probable that they contain the enzymes characteristic of animal lysosomes (containing hydrolases) or animal microbodies (containing catalase and certain oxidases). Spherosomes are also possible sites of enzyme activity but are not as common or as widely distributed as microbodies. For this reason it appears likely that the particles designated as “plant lysosomes”, “spherosomes”, “peroxisomes”, etc., in some of the cytochemical and biochemical studies on enzyme localization will prove to be microbodies. Variations in the morphology and ER associations of microbodies in tissues of bean and radish are described and discussed. “Crystal-containing bodies” (CCBs) are interpreted as a specialized type of microbody characteristic of metabolically less active cells. Stages in the formation of CCBs from microbodies of typical appearance are illustrated for Avena. The general occurrence of microbodies in meristematic and differentiating cells and their close association with the ER suggest that they may play active roles in cellular metabolism. The alterations in their morphology and numbers that are observed in certain differentiating cells suggest further that the enzyme complements and metabolic roles of microbodies might change during cellular differentiation. If so, microbodies could be the functional equivalent of both microbodies and lysosomes of animal cells.