The determination of sulfite levels and its oxidation in plant leaves

Sulfur is the sixth most abundant element in life and an important building block of proteins and cellular metabolites. Plants like bacteria can synthesize their sulfur-containing biomolecules from sulfate, where sulfite is an intermediate of the sulfur assimilation pathway. Above a certain threshold SO2/sulfite is cytotoxic and is rapidly metabolized to avoid damage. However, the existing data show considerable differences in basal sulfite levels both between species and apparent discrepancies in measured levels in the same species. In order to resolve this question we employed a sulfite detection method using chicken sulfite oxidase and developed an independent enzymatic assay, based on the specific detection of sulfite by sulfite reductase and compared those measurements to a modified colorimetric fuchsin-based method, specific for sulfite detection. We show here that when properly used the sulfite levels detected by the three methods can yield identical results. Furthermore, to examine the capacity of the plant to detoxify sulfite we injected sub-lethal sulfite solutions (yet, several folds higher than the basal levels) into Arabidopsis and tomato leaves and monitored the excess sulfite turnover. Within 3 h of sulfite injection, more than 80% of the injected sulfite in Arabidopsis and 91% in tomato were oxidized to sulfate, demonstrating the high capacity of the sulfite oxidation mechanism/s in plants.

► Sulfite can be efficiently detected in leaves by chicken SO, plant SiR and the fuchsin-dye methods.
► Sulfite levels amount to hundreds of nmol g−1 Fw in Arabidopsis, tomato and N. benthamiana leaves.
► Sub-lethal sulfite, externally applied into leaves, is rapidly and quantitatively oxidized to sulfate.