Tag: Signals and Responses

Yamauchi et al. study the formation of aerenchyma in rice – spongy tissue filled with air spaces that develop in roots of wetland plants http://www.plantcell.org/content/29/4/775.abstract Plants, like animals, need oxygen for respiration (the metabolic process of breaking down sugars to get energy).…

Kidokoro et al. investigate how plants sense cold and activate cold tolerance http://www.plantcell.org/content/29/4/760.abstract. Cold stress can be just as lethal as heat stress. When a cell freezes, the water inside it expands as it turns to ice. This can cause the cell membrane to rupture and lead…

Calcium signaling is a common plant response to many different stimuli. Vincent et al. used a fluorescent calcium reporter, GCaMP3, to record calcium responses in Arabidopsis to feeding by aphids (specifically, the green peach aphid Myzus persicae). Through analysis of various mutants, key components…

Pathogen perception leads to local and systemic immune responses including systemic acquired resistance (SAR). The nature of the mobile signals and their movements remain uncertain. Riedlmeier et al. demonstrated that certain monoterpenes including α- and β-pinene accumulate in SAR-inducing conditions…

SPA (SUPPRESSOR OF PHYTOCHROME A-105) proteins form a complex with COP1  (CONSTITUTIVELY PHOTOMORPHOGENIC 1) and are required for COP1 to respond to changes in the light environment and transduce light signals and influence plant development. In this paper, Balcerowicz et al. investigated the importance…

The mechanism by which auxin alters patters of transcription through TIR1s, ARFs and IAA proteins is well established, but less clear is our understanding of how rapid, non-transcriptional auxin responses occur. APB1 was implicated in non-transcriptional responses, but in the past few years evidence…

Plants fight back when pathogens attack, and in the first of a pair of papers Xu et al. have revealed a new insight into this response by demonstrating a significant translational upregulation of many defense-response mRNAs (10.1038/nature22371).  Previously, this group showed that the translation of…

Nitrate acts as a potent signal as well as a source of nutritional nitrogen, but key players in the nitrate response have been missing from our understanding. Liu et al. identified a unique calcium signal stimulated by nitrate in mesophyll cells. They then found that in vitro kinase activity of Ca2+-sensor…