Turgorins, Hormones of the Endogeneous Daily Rhythms of Higher Organized Plants—Detection, Isolation, Structure, Synthesis, and Activity

Probably the most fascinating biological phenomenon is the movement which is so impressively observed in higher organized plants when, e.g., in a sort of “quick retreat”, the sensitive plant apparently vanishes on touching, or when all the pinnules of an acacia fold together pairwise at dusk, as though the whole tree were going to “sleep”. Such plants and trees do not possess muscles for the movement of their organs; instead of the contraction of a “still primitive” actomyosin system in this movement the hydrostatic internal pressure of the vacuoles—the turgor—in the parenchymal cells of the motile organs is often drastically and unilaterally reduced. After preception of an external stimulus there follows a gradual or sudden change in the semipermeability of the boundry plasma layers, and, mediated by a stimulus conduction, also of all the symplasts of a multicellular plant organism. The phytohormones which form the molecular basis of the physiology of movement discussed here have now been isolated and structurally elucidated. The chemical agonists of phytodynamics, referred to as turgorins, elicit leaf movement; moreover, they very probably also regulate—perhaps together with other phytohormones—the mechanism of change of aperture in stomatal transpiration. Hence, the turgorins facilitate not only a regulation of temperature, but even their own transport in the sap of the whole plant body.