One of the most vulnerable species to climate change is plants. The rising temperatures are making plants more and more vulnerable to diseases. In an effort to keep food on the table, researchers are focusing on bolstering plant immunity against the warming world.
Climate Change vs Plants
Heat waves have become increasingly more common. When they hit, people aren't the only ones affected, plants who we depend on for food also suffer. This is because when temperatures increase, simple plant defenses fail to work as well, or none at all, leaving them susceptible to attacks from pests and pathogens.
Today, scientists have been able to identify a specific plant protein that explains why immunity falters as mercury rises. The team behind the recent study has also figured out a way to reverse the immunity loss and bolster the plant's defenses against heat.
The findings published in the journal Nature, titled "Increasing The Resilience Of Plant Immunity To A Warming Climate" were found in a lab rat plant known as Arabidopsis thaliana. If the same results can be observed in crops it would usher in news for food security despite the warming of global temperatures.
For decades, scientists have known that above-normal temperatures suppress the ability of plants to make a defense hormone known as salicylic acid, which fires up the immune system of plants and stops foreign invaders before they cause too much damage. However, the molecular mechanisms at play for the immunity meltdown weren't fully understood.
During the mid-2010s, Sheng-Yang He, lead author, and Bethany Huot found that even short heat exposure can have a dramatic effect on the Arabidopsis plants' hormone defense, leaving the plant more susceptible to infection from Pseudomonas syringae - a bacterium.
Normally, when the pathogen attacks, the plant's levels of salicylic acid go up seven folds to keep the bacteria from spreading. However, when temperatures exceed 86 degrees for two days plants can no longer make enough defense hormone to keep infections from taking control.
Understanding Plant Immunity
He explains that plants get more infections at warmer temperatures due to the decrease in basal immunity. Hence, the team wanted to understand how plants feel the increases in temperature and what can be done to fix it and make plants more heat-resilient.
During the same time, a different team found that plant cell molecules called phytochromes function as the plant's internal thermometers, helping them sense warmer temperatures in the spring and activating their growth and flowering.
Hence, He and his colleagues wondered: could the same molecule be what knocking down the plant's immune system when temperatures exceed the norms, and what could be the key to bringing it back down.
The team found that not only was salicylic acid defense production impaired due to elevated temperatures for Arabidopsis but was also true for crop plants like rapeseed, rice, and tomato.
For Arabidopsis, keeping the master switch molecule CPB60g from feeling the increase in temperature not only restores the genes necessary for creating salicylic acid but also protected other necessary defense-related genes against warmer temperatures, reports EurekAlert.
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