Salicylic acid and the machinery of hypersensitive cell death in disease resistance.

MARIA ELENA ALVAREZ

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2000 vol. 44 p. 429 - 429

lthough extensive data has described the key role of salicylic acid (SA) in signaling pathogen-induced disease resistance, its function in physiological processes related to cell death is still poorly understood. Recent studies have explored the requirement of SA formounting the hypersensitive response (HR) against an invading pathogen, where a particular cell death process is activated at the site of attempted infection causing a confined lesion. Biochemical data suggest that SA potentiates the signal pathway for HR by affecting an early phosphorylation-sensitive step preceding the generation of pro-death signals, including those derived from the oxidative burst. Accordingly, the epistatic relationship between cell death and SA accumulation, analyzed in crosses between lesion-mimic mutants (spontaneous lesion formation) and the transgenic nahG line (depleted in SA) places the SA activity in a feedback loop downstream and upstream of cell death. Exciting advances have been mad