How does it feel?

When humans get hurt, they feel pain, but that pain signal passes through a chain of relay reactions. A similar thing happens to plants.  When a stimulus appears, for instance a pathogen attack, a plant receives this information through a receptor, analyses it, sometimes amplifies it and forms a corresponding reaction. 

“[A] plant hormone auxin, the major intracellular regulator of plant growth and development, is like a finger which pushes domino blocks.  The first block is the receptor, the activation of which moves other blocks.  At the end of this chain is a little ball, the final factor, which changes the expression of a defined set of genes, either inhibiting or activating the formation of proteins which affect the final physiological response of the organism,” says Dr. Krzysztof Jaworski.

Tests on plants as diverse as Arabidopsis and moss show that this is likely to be a common system for all plants.

The current model of canonical auxin signalling relies on TIR1/AFB auxin receptors acting as F-box proteins, which form a functional SCF-type E3 ubiquitin ligase together with other subunits… Here we show that TIR1/AFB receptors have an additional, AC activity that requires the AC motif in the C-terminal region of the protein… Given that TIR1/AFB receptors from both Arabidopsis and moss demonstrate similar AC activity, it is likely that TIR1/AFB receptors across all land plants share this activity.

Qi et al. 2022.

📰 Press Release: Eurekalert
🔬 Research: Adenylate cyclase activity of TIR1/AFB auxin receptors in plants @ Nature.
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