In plants, the jasmonate, or JA, signaling pathway helps plants control their defense responses to environmental stresses. Like the human body, plants respond differently to individual threats. Just as people wouldn't get a fever due to a sprained ankle, plants deal with harmful elements in particular ways.
A study from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory Howe lab looks at how plants respond to environmental threats in the correct way. This study was published in"Plants encounter so many environmental stressors, including biotic stressors like pathogens or insects," said Leah Johnson, co-first author on the study and former graduate student in the Howe lab.
The researchers grew mutant Arabidopsis thaliana plants which were missing most of their JAZs. As JAZs keep the defense responses under control, their removal results in an uncontrolled defense response, somewhat analogous to autoimmunity. Because the mutant plant was spending so much energy on defending itself from all threats, even if those threats were not present, it had less energy to grow. The plants were smaller and produced fewer seeds than their counterpart found in the wild.
Johnson continued,"We found that subsets of these families [JAZ and MYC] differentially regulate responses to insects versus necrotrophic pathogens. This suggests that these families obtained distinct regulatory functions at some point in plantand suggests a mechanism for how plants can respond correctly to different stressors."
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