In times of war, factories are converted to meet the needs of conflict. Assembly lines change course from making car parts to machine guns or from making washing machines to airplane engines. But as Duke University professor Xinnian Dong said, vegetables can also drastically change your daily routine when attacks come This put them in danger.
Crops and other plants are often under attack by bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. When a plant detects a microbial invasion, it makes radical changes to the chemical soup of proteins, the molecules of life, inside its cells.
In recent years, Dong and his team have been trying to figure out how to do this. In a new study published in the journal CellDong and first author Jinlong Wang reveal key components in plant cells. They reprogram their protein-making machinery to fight disease.
About 15% of crop yields are lost each year due to bacterial and fungal diseases, costing the global economy around 220 billion Euros. Dong said plants rely on their immune systems to defend themselves.
Unlike animals, plants do not have specialized immune cells that can travel to the site of infection through the bloodstream; Every cell in the plant has to stand up and fight to defend itself.quickly goes into combat mode.
When plants are attacked, their usual priority (growth) is replaced by defense, so cells begin to synthesize new proteins and suppress the production of others. Then, “things will be back to normal in two or three hours,” Dong explained.
Tens of thousands of proteins produced in cells do many jobs: catalyzing reactions, serving as chemical messengers, recognizing foreign materials, transporting materials in and out, etc. Genetic instructions in DNA packaged in the cell nucleus are copied into a messenger molecule called mRNA to create a specific protein. This mRNA sequence then makes its way into the cytoplasm, where a structure called the ribosome “reads” the message and translates it into a protein.
Dong and his team found in a 2017 study that when a plant is infected, certain mRNA molecules are translated into proteins faster than others. The researchers discovered that what these mRNA molecules have in common is a region at the front end of the RNA strand with repeating letters in its genetic code.
In the new study, Dong, Wang and colleagues show how. this region works with other structures within the cell to activate “wartime” protein production..
They showed that when plants detect a pathogen attack, the molecular signals that signal the usual starting point for ribosomes to descend and read mRNA are destroyed, preventing the cell from producing typical “peacetime” proteins.
Instead, ribosomes bypass the usual starting point for translation to dock and start reading from there, using the repeating A and G site within the RNA molecule. “They’re basically using a shortcut”said Dong.
a risky venture
However, for plants, fighting infection is not a free action, Dong said. Allocating more resources to defense means less for photosynthesis and other activities in life.. Producing too many defense proteins can cause secondary damage: plants with an overactive immune system suffer from stunted growth.
Understanding how plants achieve this balance, DongScientists hope to find new ways to produce disease-resistant crops without sacrificing performance.
Dong’s team did most of their experiments on a mustard-like plant called mustard. Arabidopsis thaliana. But similar mRNA sequences have been found in other organisms, including fruit flies, mice and humans, so they may play a broader role in controlling protein synthesis in plants and animals alike, Dong said.
Reference work: https://phys.org/news/2022-08-reprogram-cells-invaders.html
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Environment department contact address:crisclimatica@prensaiberica.es
Source: Informacion
