Self-defense for plants
January 8, 2018, Salk Institute
When you see brown spots on otherwise healthy green leaves, you may be witnessing a plant's immune response as it tries to keep a bacterial infection from spreading. Some plants are more resistant to such infections than others, and plant biologists want to understand why. Salk Institute scientists studying a plant protein called SOBER1 recently discovered one mechanism by which, counterintuitively, plants seem to render themselves less resistant to infection.
The work, which appeared in Nature Communications on December 19, 2017, sheds light on plant resistance generally and could lead to strategies to boost plants' natural immunity or to better contain infections that threaten to destroy an entire agricultural crop.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-self-defense.html#jCp
