Chloroplast tubes play a key role in plants' immune defense
2015-06-25
(Press-News.org) Chloroplasts, better known for taking care of photosynthesis in plant cells, play an unexpected role in responding to infections in plants, researchers at UC Davis and the University of Delaware have found.
When plant cells are infected with pathogens, networks of tiny tubes called stromules extend from the chloroplasts and make contact with the cell's nucleus, the team discovered. The tubes likely deliver signals from the chloroplast to the nucleus that induce programmed cell death of infected cells and prepare other cells to resist infection. The work is published online June 25 in the journal Developmental Cell.
"This opens a new area of understanding how the chloroplast communicates with the nucleus, and likely with other organelles within the cell," said Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, professor of plant biology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper.
Chloroplasts in neighboring uninfected cells also produce stromules, apparently signaling the nucleus to switch on genes that make cells more resistant to infection. The overall effect is to wall off and contain an infection, Dinesh-Kumar said.
Stromules were first described more than 50 years ago, but until now their role in a specific biological process has remained a mystery.
Mammalian cells lack chloroplasts but do have mitochondria, which play a role in cellular suicide. Exactly what chloroplasts, do other than photosynthesis, has been largely ignored, Dinesh-Kumar said. But it's clear that they are "powerhouses" producing molecules for the rest of the cell.
INFORMATION:
The work was supported by the NIH. Other authors on the paper are Jeffrey Caplan, Amutha Sampath Kumar, Kyle Hoban, Shannon Modla and Kirk Czymmek at the University of Delaware and Eunsook Park and Meenu S. Padmanabhan at the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-06-25
Magnolias are prized for their large, colorful, fragrant flowers. Does the attractive, showy tree also harbor a potent cancer fighter?
Yes, according to a growing number of studies, including one from VA and the University of Alabama at Birmingham that is now online in the journal Oncotarget.
The study focused on squamous cell head and neck cancers, a scourge among those who use tobacco and alcohol. According to the National Cancer Institute, at least 3 in 4 head and neck cancers are caused by the use of tobacco and alcohol. The cancers have only a 50 percent survival ...
2015-06-25
Without new conservation efforts, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could lose up to 20 percent of its forests, unleashing a 60 percent increase in carbon emissions, says a new study by researchers at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.
Published by PLOS ONE, the study explores Central Africa's tropical forests, which are among the world's largest carbon reserves. While these forests have historically experienced low deforestation rates, pressures to clear land are growing due to development, foreign investment in agriculture, and ...
2015-06-25
An international group of academic leaders, journal editors and funding-agency representatives and disciplinary leaders, including Rick Wilson, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair of Political Science and professor of statistics and psychology at Rice University, has announced guidelines to further strengthen transparency and reproducibility practices in science research reporting.
The group, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee at the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Va., outlined its new guidelines in a story published in this week's edition of ...
2015-06-25
Rainwater could save people in India a bucket of money, according to a new study by scientists looking at NASA satellite data.
The study, partially funded by NASA's Precipitation Measurement Missions, found that collecting rainwater for vegetable irrigation could reduce water bills, increase caloric intake and even provide a second source of income for people in India.
The study, published in the June issue of Urban Water Journal, is based on precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace ...
2015-06-25
The majority of the United States' poor aren't sitting on street corners. They're employed at low-paying jobs, struggling to support themselves and a family.
In the past, differing definitions of employment and poverty prevented researchers from agreeing on who and how many constitute the "working poor."
But a new study by sociologists at BYU, Cornell and LSU provides a rigorous new estimate. Their work suggests about 10 percent of working households are poor. Additionally, households led by women, minorities or individuals with low education are more likely to be ...
2015-06-25
A new study led by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego indicates a steady population trend for blue whales and an upward population trend for fin whales in Southern California.
Scripps marine acoustician Ana Širović and her colleagues in the Marine Bioacoustics Lab and Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab intermittently deployed 16 High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs)--devices that sit on the seafloor with a suspended hydrophone (an underwater microphone)--to collect acoustic data on whales off Southern California from 2006-2012. ...
2015-06-25
MINNEAPOLIS - A new study suggests that errors on memory and thinking tests may signal Alzheimer's up to 18 years before the disease can be diagnosed. The research is published in the June 24, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
"The changes in thinking and memory that precede obvious symptoms of Alzheimer's disease begin decades before," said study author Kumar B. Rajan, PhD, with Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "While we cannot currently detect such changes in individuals at risk, we were able to ...
2015-06-25
"Hydraulic fracturing" (or fracking) and "environmentally friendly" often do not appear in the same sentence together. But as the United States teeters on the precipice of a shale gas boom, Northwestern University professor Fengqi You is exploring ways to make the controversial activity easier on the environment -- and the wallet.
"Shale gas is promising," said You, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "No matter if you like it or not, it's already out there. The question we want ...
2015-06-25
Over 50 leading doctors and academics including Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of The BMJ, have signed an open letter published in The Guardian today calling on the Wellcome Trust to divest from fossil fuel companies.
The letter is part of The Guardian's "Keep it in the Ground" Campaign that is urging the world's two biggest charitable funds -- the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation -- to move their money out of fossil fuels.
It reads: "Divestment rests on the premise that it is wrong to profit from an industry whose core business threatens human and planetary health, ...
2015-06-25
EDMONTON, Alberta, June 25 -- Working towards the ultimate goal to develop therapeutics to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and BSE (Mad Cow Disease), University of Alberta scientists Michael Woodside, Hao Yu, and Derek Dee are investigating the physical principles underlying the formation of misfolded protein aggregates. The aggregates of misfolded proteins -- proteins that clump together in the "wrong" structure -- feature prominently in these fatal degenerative diseases.
"This is the big mystery we're trying to solve," says Woodside, a professor ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Chloroplast tubes play a key role in plants' immune defense
