CPR5 - a Jack of all trades in plants

In our recent paper in Journal of Experimental Botany, we examined the effects of cpr5/old1 mutations and CPR5 overexpression on Arabidopsis growth and development. We found that CPR5 is important for early plant growth but promotes senescence at late development and hence proposed it as a senescence-regulatory gene as predicted by the Evolutionary Theory of Senescence derived from studies on animal ageing. One of the key unsolved issues is how CPR5 contributes to the early plant growth and development. Here we discuss the possible cellular functions of CPR5.