Importance of Lewis A epitopes for Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000 infection of Arabidopsis thaliana
Abstract
Plants are constantly exposed to a plethora of different environmental stresses (eg. drought, heat, pathogens and diseases) which tremendously affect the productivity of crop plants and constitute a major issue of contemporary agriculture and food security worldwide. Nevertheless, plants have developed diverse defense mechanisms which enable survival under unfavorable conditions. One of the major goals of plant research in the 21st century is to increase our understanding of the complex plant immune system and to identify core components of the defense response, in order to engineer more resistant, high yield and improved quality crops. An important post-translational modification involved in plant defence responses includes protein N-glycosylation. In plants, the only known outer chain elongation of complex N-glycans is the attachment of galactose and fucose residues, which form a highly specific trisaccharide known as the Lewis A epitope. Plants use a broad variety of proteins (lectins) with carbohydrate recognition domains to counteract pathogen attack. In the last decade, it became clear that plant exposure to different stresses results in the synthesis of minute amounts of some specific, inducible, plant lectins which are believed to be involved in intracellular plant defense signaling. Recent observations revealed that F-box Nictaba acts as a stress inducible lectin that can specifically recognize Lewis A motifs. Transcription levels for the lectin are highly upregulated in trichomes of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana after bacterial infection. Intriguingly, this rise in F-box Nictaba transcripts in the trichomes is accompanied by higher expression levels for the glycosyltransferases important for the synthesis of Lewis A epitopes. Infection experiments with Pseudomonas revealed that transgenic lines with enhanced F-box Nictaba expression are less susceptible to bacterial infection, whereas knockout lines for F-box Nictaba expression show more severe disease symptoms. In this project the relationship and interaction of Lewis A epitopes, F-box Nictaba and defence responses during the bacterial infection process will be investigated to reveal the biological function of this specific carbohydrate epitope.
Publikationen
Project staff
Richard Strasser
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Richard Strasser
richard.strasser@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-94345
Project Leader
01.04.2016 - 31.12.2019
BOKU partners
External partners
Ghent University
Els Van Damme
partner