Talk:Oil body

Question

Yes, but what does it DO?68.101.123.219 (talk) 22:43, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Contradictory information: oil bodies in seeds

There is contradictory information in this article, brief though it is. First it says that oil bodies are "found almost uniquely within the cells of liverworts." Similarly, the article on Liverworts says that "90% of liverworts contain oil bodies in at least some of their cells, and these cellular structures are absent from most other bryophytes and from all vascular plants." Liverworts are non-vascular plants which do not have seeds or fruit. The present article goes on to say "Oil bodies are most abundant in fruits and seeds, but can be found throughout the plant body. Sunflowers, peanuts, flax, and sesame seeds are about 45% oil bodies by weight." Only vascular plants have fruits and seeds. I am going to remove the statements about oil bodies in seeds. Steorra (talk) 17:49, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. Trying to look into this more deeply, and it's very confusing. There are scientific-looking things on the internet that talk about oil bodies being exclusive to liverworts, and there are equally scientific-looking things on the internet that talk about oil bodies in seeds and other parts of vascular plants. The word 'oleosomes' is often used in connection with the term 'oil bodies' in the context of vascular plants, but seems to be less used in the context of liverworts. I suspect that there are actually two different things that both get called 'oil bodies', one that occurs only in liverworts and one that occurs in vascular plants. That would mean that some sort of disambiguation is called for. But I can't figure out what's actually going on enough to be sure, let alone to actually make the disambiguation. Steorra (talk) 18:19, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

The term elaiosome (oleosome) is used when discussing a multicellular structure in seed plants, while "oil body" is used to refer to an organelle in the cells of liverworts. These are not the same kind of structure. Oleosomes are transitory mutlicellular structures usually found only in certain life cycle stages of seed plants, while the oil bodies of liverworts are mature organelles that are diagnostic for many liverwort genera and species. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:00, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, but it still doesn't explain some of what I've found in a Google search for 'oil bodies'. For instance, this abstract [1] says:

"Plant seeds store triacylglycerols as energy sources for germination and postgerminative growth of seedlings. The triacylglycerols are preserved in small, discrete, intracellular organelles called oil bodies."

This is clearly talking about a) seed plants and b) intracellular structures, not multicellular structures. And there are lots of similar references found in the same Google search.

Here is another Wikipedia page which talks about oil bodies in a context including seeds: Oleosin. And another one where it's not clear to me whether it's meant in a liverwort-specific sense or a sense including seed plants: Elaioplast. If you understand what's going on, perhaps you could straighten them out? Steorra (talk) 14:30, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

As far as the abstract you quoted, I would need to have more contextual information to be certain what was meant. It is not clear whether the "oil bodies" they mention are located in the cytoplasm or within a plastid. An elaioplast is a plastid containing oil droplets, and if this is what is meant in the cited abstract, then it is a structure within an organelle, and not a separate structure as in liverworts.

One thing I am not certain of, is whether the information about oil bodies "not being an organelle" (added by an anon) was information about liverwort oil bodies or the deposits found in elaioplasts. I'm not sure that I have access to sufficient information here to answer that, and may need to make a trip to a specialist library or contact a former colleague who might know. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:00, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Disentangling info about liverwort oil bodies and seed plant oil bodies

This article may provide some useful information for disentangling information about liverwort oil bodies from seed plant oil bodies, which seem to be two quite different things. Here is a quote from the article:

Liverwort oil bodies are intracytoplasmic secretory structures bound by single membranes that originate from the dilatation of endoplasmic reticulum cisternae (Suire, 1970; Duckett and Ligrone, 1995). They have no subcellular equivalent in spermaphytes and are unlike plant seed oil bodies that accumulate mostly acyl lipids surrounded by a monolayer of phospholipids containing basic proteins, oleosins (Tzen and Huang, 1992).

This makes it sound like the reference to oleosin in oil bodies belongs to the seed plant sense, not the liverwort sense. Since it was also added in the edit that added seed plants to the discussion, I'm going to remove it; also removing a reference that went with the seed plant discussion but didn't get removed when I removed the other seed plant material.

This article gives a brief historical discussion of the literature on oil bodies and other oil-storage structures in seed plants, and the different terminology that has been used for them (oil bodies, elaioplasts, oleosomes, spherosomes, oil droplets; it sounds like even in the scientific literature there is some terminological confusion. Steorra (talk) 20:39, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I've attempted a rewrite to include information about both kinds of oil bodies and distinguish between them. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about biology and may well have made some mistakes but I'm pretty sure my disentangled version is an improvement over what was there before. Steorra (talk) 21:40, 17 September 2011 (UTC)