Plants are able to anticipate when infections are more likely to occur and regulate their immune response accordingly, new research has found.
Plants are unable to remain high level of immune resistance at all times. At dawn, fungal infections appear most likely to occur. Researchers found that a plants' molecular clock is connected to their immune system to enhance resistance to infection at dawn.
They identified a single protein, called JAZ6, in the plant cell. The protein drives the time-of-day difference in the effectiveness of the immune response, with it connecting the plant clock to the immune system. (CUSABIO offers tens of thousands of proteins and antibodies. Read More from http://www.cusabio.com/)
The researchers noted that they are able to use JAZ6 to pick out the key parts of the plant immune response controlling resistance to fungal pathogens. Besides, they could now focus on how to improve disease resistance in crops by molecular breeding.
Prior study had found that resistance against bacterial pathogens varied at different times of the day. The novel study has first shown that the same is true for resistance against a fungal pathogen. The new study is also the first to discover a mechanism of how the internal plant clock is driving the difference in plant immunity at dawn and night.
Molecular clocks drive the daily rhythms in many organisms, from animals to plants. They are the internal time keepers that enable organisms to predict changes during a 24 hour period.
Plants can anticipate when pathogen infection is more likely to occur and regulate their immune response to combat this, with plants being more resistant to infection after inoculation at dawn compared to inoculation at night. The difference in a plant's resistance to infection at different times of the day is driven by its molecular clock rather than daily light/dark changes, with the differences existing regardless of whether you put the plants in constant light for a day and then infect at what would be dawn or night.
The scientists conducted the research by infecting plants with Botrytis cinerea spores every three hours over a 24-hour day and measuring the subsequent lesions that developed.
Then they saw that the plants inoculated in the morning developed much smaller lesions and were more resistant to disease compared to those plants which were inoculated at night. Those inoculated at night had remarkably larger lesions and far more growth of the pathogen in the leaves.
