Phosphorylation of rice sucrose synthase isoforms promotes the activity of sucrose degradation.

Sucrose is utilized as an initial material for production of the storage substances. Sucrose synthase reversibly catalyzes reactions of the sucrose degradation and its synthesis between sucrose with UDP and UDP-glucose with fructose. They also had the activity of the reactions for sucrose degradation of sucrose with ADP, and sucrose synthesis from ADP-glucose and fructose. Rice has three representative isoforms of sucrose synthase, Rsus1, Rsus2, and Rsus3, in which Rsus1 and Rsus3 are highly expressed in developing seeds. These three isoforms were phosphorylated by SPK, a calcium-dependent protein kinase. By phosphorylation, they showed increase of their reactivity for sucrose degradation on both reactions using UDP and ADP. In contrast, the synthetic activity of these isoforms was not altered by phosphorylation in any cases of the reactions with UDP-glucose and ADP-glucose. These results indicated that phosphorylation of sucrose synthase isoforms selectively led to enhance the reactivity for sucrose degradation.