New plant hormone

From the Crumb Trail weblog comes a story of a new hormone which seems to govern plant immune response. The original article is here in BioMedNet (free registration required) bq. Researchers in the US have found what appears to be a pivotal protein in the plant immune response. It's a discovery that could further the development of disease-resistant plants, they say. bq. The plant hormone salicylic acid (SA), from which aspirin is derived, plays a key role in the signaling pathway via which plants respond to infection. Levels of the hormone increase when plants are attacked by certain pathogens. Until now, scientists were unsure what happened next. Now, two researchers at Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) in Ithaca, New York, claim to have taken a major step towards the answer. bq. Besides being an environmentally friendly way to fight pests, enhancing the natural immune response of plants might be more effective than using pesticides. With pesticides, explained Klessig, there is "enormous selection pressure for pathogens to mutate." Thus, he says, it is only a matter of time before pests become resistant to current pesticides. Plant geneticists can already move specific disease-resistance genes from one plant to another. But again, pests can readily adapt to one such change at a time. It would be more difficult for a pathogen to evolve resistance to plants' innate immunity, Klessig notes, which involves a whole "arsenal" of defenses. This will be fun for the environmentalists to try to grok - a use of Genetic Modification that makes a plant's resistance to disease more environmentally friendly. I can smell the wood smoke from their poor brains now...