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plants have immune systems



The article below emphasizes two important new developments in our understanding of the plants immune system and in the process of alternate splicing of messenger RNA. In recent years it has grown clear that plants have an immune system bearing some similarity to the animal immune system. There has also been growing awareness that one gene can express many different protein products by splicing messenger RNA in alternative ways.Such splicing is very important in plant immunity.
Pages 392-398 volume 7 Trends in Plant Science
Alternative splicing of transcripts encoding Toll-like plant resistance proteins ¯ what's the functional relevance to innate immunity?

Tina Jordan, Sebastian Schornack and Thomas LahayeE-mail The

Abstract

Innate immunity in plants and animals shares many structural and functional homologies, which suggests an ancient origin of cellular defense mechanisms in both kingdoms. Pathogen sensing in animal innate immunity is mediated by Toll-like receptors (TLRs). These receptors have TIR (Toll/interleukin-1 receptor) domains and leucine-rich repeats, which are modules also present in many plant resistance (R) proteins. Molecular analysis of transcripts encoding animal TLRs and Toll-like plant R proteins revealed many cases of alternative splicing. Recent studies of the tobacco N and the Arabidopsis RPS4 genes, both encoding Toll-like plant R proteins, showed that intron-deprived genes have reduced or no activity, suggesting that alternative splicing is a crucial component in these signaling pathways.
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