Plant Scientists Show Real Time Images of Plant Response to Disease and Damages

An interdisciplinary team from the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, has produced real time images of what happens when plants beat off insects and respond to disease and damage. Their research, published in Nature Communications, focused on the plant hormone jasmonic acid, a defense compound which is released during insect attack and controls response to damage and disease.

Prof. Malcolm Bennett, from The University of Nottingham, said: "Understanding how plants respond to mechanical damage, such as insect attack, is important for developing crops which cope better under stress." The team created a special fluorescent protein called Jas9-VENUS that is rapidly degraded after jasmonic acid is produced. This allowed them to monitor the plant part/tissue where jasmonic levels increased as the fluorescent signal is lost.

The research team mimicked insect feeding on a leaf by using a blade to damage it. With the fluorescent protein they were able to take images of how damage to a leaf quickly results in a pulse of jasmonic acid that reaches all the way down to the tip of the root, at a speed of more than a centimeter per minute. Through the images, they saw that once this hormone pulse reaches the root it triggers more jasmonic acid to be produced locally, amplifying the wounding signal and ensuring other parts of the plant to prepare for an attack.

Read more at:  
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2015/january/picture-this-biosecurity-seen-from-the-inside.aspx.