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About the Authors:
Brett M. Tyler
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1549-2987Citation: Tyler BM (2017) The fog of war: How network buffering protects plants’ defense secrets from pathogens. PLoS Genet 13(5): e1006713. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006713
Editor: Gitta Coaker, University of California Davis, UNITED STATES
Published: May 4, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Brett M. Tyler. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Plants lack the mechanisms needed for adaptive immunity and thus rely entirely on innate immunity to protect themselves from pathogens and pests [1]. Their innate immune systems must protect against innumerable, highly adaptable viruses bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, nematodes, and insects. Two important components of the plant immune system are induced by the presence of pathogen molecules [1]. One of these is triggered by molecules common to multiple microbes (pathogen-associated molecular patterns [PAMPs]), such as bacterial flagellin, fungal, or arthropod chitin fragments. PAMP-triggered immunity (PTI) is mediated by a diversity of cell surface receptors, some of which carry intracellular kinase domains. The second inducible component of defense is triggered as a result of plants’ recognition of specific virulence proteins (effectors) produced by pathogens-known as effector-triggered immunity (ETI).
Complex and overlapping networks of signal transduction events mediate and integrate the induction of the defense responses that comprise PTI and ETI [2]. Signaling networks that mediate plants’ responses to the abiotic environment must also be integrated [3]. These signaling networks involve phosphorylation cascades as well as the release of chemical signals, such as reactive oxygen species, lipid and inositol derivatives, and plant hormones, such as salicylic acid (SA), jasmonic acid (JA), ethylene (ET), and abscisic acid [4]. The defense responses themselves include thousands of gene expression changes involving genes encoding antimicrobial proteins and peptides, secondary metabolite biosynthetic genes, and many genes of currently unknown function [4].
Molecular dissections of successful plant pathogens have revealed that a common strategy for...