Current Biology
Volume 17, Issue 20, 23 October 2007, Pages 1784-1790
Journal home page for Current Biology

Report
Salicylic Acid Inhibits Pathogen Growth in Plants through Repression of the Auxin Signaling Pathway

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.09.025Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Summary

The phytohormone auxin regulates almost every aspect of plant development. At the molecular level, auxin induces gene expression through direct physical interaction with the TIR1-like F box proteins, which in turn remove the Aux/IAA family of transcriptional repressors 1, 2, 3, 4. A growing body of evidence indicates that many plant pathogens can either produce auxin themselves or manipulate host auxin biosynthesis to interfere with the host's normal developmental processes 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. In response, plants probably evolved mechanisms to repress auxin signaling during infection as a defense strategy. Plants overaccumulating the defense signal molecule salicylic acid (SA) frequently display morphological phenotypes that are reminiscent of auxin-deficient or auxin-insensitive mutants, indicating that SA might interfere with auxin responses. By using the Affymetrix ATH1 GeneChip for Arabidopsis thaliana, we performed a comprehensive study of the effects of SA on auxin signaling [12]. We found that SA causes global repression of auxin-related genes, including the TIR1 receptor gene, resulting in stabilization of the Aux/IAA repressor proteins and inhibition of auxin responses. We demonstrate that this inhibitory effect on auxin signaling is a part of the SA-mediated disease-resistance mechanism.

SIGNALING

Cited by (0)

3

Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.

4

These authors contributed equally to this work.