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Press Info item.
24/11/2009
Helping plants to fight against saline stress
Defending plants from saline stress is now a worrying situation encountered in many parts of the world that suffer from increasing pressure on water resources, notably because of climate change and the need to increase crop yields to feed a growing world population. A Franco-Greek research team, including INRA researchers, has recently demonstrated a new mechanism that prepares plants to respond effectively to saline stress. This study, which opens opportunities for the development of pre-treatments designed to conquer new areas that are currently uncultivable or salinized following over-intensive farming, was published in The Plant Journal
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Soil salinity is one of the principal environmental constraints weighing on modern farming. Throughout the world, about 20% of cultivated land and 50% of irrigated land contains salt levels that are harmful to plant development. In Europe, between 1999 and 2007, 6-10% of the utilised agricultural area was affected by salinity. The worst affected countries are Spain, Italy and Hungary.
The researchers thus studied the impact of pre-treating the roots of young citrus plants (Citrus aurantium L.) with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) (i.e. oxygenated water) and nitric oxide (NO) on how these plants acclimatized to salinity. Their findings demonstrated that such pre-treatments markedly reduced the harmful effects on plants caused by saline stress, such as leaf wilt or inhibited growth. An analysis of the leaf protein composition revealed that the levels of accumulation of 85 proteins varied as a function of saline stress. And, remarkably, a large proportion of these changes were not observed when the plants had been pre-treated with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) or nitric oxide (NO).
Researchers in the INRA-AgroParisTech Joint Research Unit for Seed Biology, based at the Institut Jean Pierre Bourgin (IJPB) in Versailles, have thus for the first time identified in citrus plants a protein fraction whose function is modulated by the fixation of nitric oxide to some of their amino acids. This study revealed several specific proteins that undergo chemical modifications such as oxidation or nitrosylation (fixation of an NO group) in response to saline stress. Globally, the results indicated a strong overlap between the signalling pathways induced by H2O2 and NO in the context of plant acclimatization to salinity. It appears that the regulation of protein oxidation and nitrosylation is an essential mechanism through which the two stimulating molecules, H2O2 and NO, prepare plants to respond more effectively to saline stress.
Figure: Citrus plants (Citrus aurantium L.) cultivated in a saline medium without (a) or with (b) pre-treatment with H202 or an NO donor (SNP). From: Tanou et al. (2009 – Plant Journal)
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References:
Proteomics reveals the overlapping roles of hydrogen peroxide and nitric oxide in the acclimation of citrus plants to salinity. Tanou G., Job C., Rajjou L., Arc E., Belghazi M., Diamantidis G., Molassiotis A,. Job D. - The Plant Journal, (2009), 13 August.
- Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
- CNRS-Université Claude Bernard Lyon-Institut National des Sciences Appliquées-Bayer CropScience Joint Laboratory (UMR 5240), Lyon cedex, France
- Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique-AgroParisTech, Laboratoire de Biologie des Semences (UMR 204), F-78026 Versailles Cedex, France
- Centre d’Analyse Protéomique de Marseille, Institut Fédératif de Recherche Jean Roche, F–13916 Marseille cedex 20, France
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