Answer 1:
Plants get nutrients and water from the soil,
but they don’t uptake sugar since they make
their own glucose from photosynthesis. Water
gets into the plant root by osmosis, and if
there is too much sugar in the water, the plant
won’t be able to uptake water effectively and it
will wilt and possibly die. So you can’t cause
a plant to get diabetes by feeding it too much
sugar.
Even though plants make their own glucose they
do have to carefully regulate the amount of
glucose available and maintain homeostasis. In
plants, sugar regulation is usually controlled by
the vacuoles, which store excess glucose
when the plant has plenty, and release sugar when
needed. Excess sugar can also be converted to
starch and stored in
plastids. The signaling pathway that tells
the vacuole when to release and when to store
sugar is quite complicated, but it basically
involves regulatory proteins called
kinases, some of which bind to sugar and can
sense when there is too much or too little
glucose. These proteins can also signal the
plant to turn on or off various genes that control
the plant’s metabolism.
In humans, the regulation of sugar in the blood is
controlled by the hormones insulin and
glucagon. Diabetes is associated with the
pancreas not making enough insulin. This is a very
different mechanism of sugar regulation than that
used by plants, and so plants can’t get
diabetes because they have no insulin and no
pancreas. But your question brings up a good
point: given that sugar regulation is important
and involves many interacting components, any
problems, such as an important gene mutation that
messes up the plant’s ability to regulate its
glucose metabolism, would be very detrimental to
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