Cysteine protease is one of the well-studied proteolytic enzymes in plants. This class of protease has been implicated in various physiological aspects of developmental stages in plants including seed germination, senescence, and disease immunity. A handful of studies assign plants cysteine protease in different molecular battlefield under a few selected pathosystems, and initially extricate complex molecular mechanism of resistance. Interestingly, the same type of proteases released by pathogens have been demonstrated to play a crucial role in establishing disease infection in plants. Most of which target resistance proteins resulting either in an access to the hosts biochemical loot or cascades of signals for defense. As means of enabling and disabling host immunity, this class of protease is subject to diversifying selection, which is an intriguing outcome under natural host pathosystem. This paper summar izes the key roles of cysteine proteases in a few selected plant pathosystems.
This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT DNA methylation is a common and rapid evolving epigenetic mechanism among higher eukaryotic organisms including cytosine residues in CG and CNG sequences. NtROS2a gene isolated from tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum cv Xanthi nc) contains DNA glycosylase domain with significant similarities to Arabidopsis ROS1 and DME at the C-terminus. Purified NtROS2a protein gene is 5,879 bp long and is designated as Nicotiana tabacum Repressor Of Silencing (NtROS: accession numbers; AB281588).RT-PCR analysis initially revealed the adaptive response of the lines overexpressing the gene in tobacco to various abiotic stresses. This was validated when phenotypic evaluation to cold, salt, simulated drought and osmotic stress tolerance was performed. Reduction in leaf wilting rate against high salinity treatment is remarkable in transgenic plants which showed at least 50% less wilting than the WT. Moreover, about 70% wilt rate difference was noted between the transgenic and WT in H2O2 treatment. This study showed that NtROS2a gene encoding DNA glycosylase which caused demethylation could regulate adaptive response of tobacco to various abiotic stress conditions.
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