How Plants' Threat-detection Mechanisms Raise the Alarm

upstart writes:

How plants' threat-detection mechanisms raise the alarm:

New work led by Carnegie's Zhiyong Wang untangles a complex cellular signaling process that underpins plants' ability to balance expending energy on growth and defending themselves from pathogens. These findings, published in Nature Plants, show how plants use complex cellular circuits to process information and respond to threats and environmental conditions.

"Plants don't have brains like us, and they may be fixed in place and unable to flee from predators or pathogens, but don't feel sorry for them, because they've evolved an incredible network of information-processing circuits that enable them to 'make decisions' in response to the situations in which they find themselves," Wang explained.

[...] Higher plants put hundreds of highly specialized sensors, called receptor kinases, on their cell surfaces to monitor the environment and to communicate between cells. Wang's lab is working to elucidate the molecular circuits that connect these sensors to specific cellular responses, such as growth and immunity. Improving our understanding of how plants make cellular decisions can underpin technological interventions for improving agricultural yields in the face of a warming planet.

[...] When a plant senses a threat, it needs to activate communication chains that raise the alarm and tell it to fight off the pathogen. There are two main types of threat-detection mechanisms in plant cells-the ability to recognize distinctive chemical patterns that signify an invader, such as components of a bacterial cell, and the ability to recognize a disruption caused by invading pathogen.

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