Green leaf volatiles enhance methyl jasmonate response in Arabidopsis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiosc.2012.06.010Get rights and content

Plants emit green leaf volatiles (GLVs) in response to insect or pathogen damage. GLVs consist of C6 and C9 aldehydes, alcohols, and their acetate esters, and play important roles in the plant defense response. One of the functions of GLVs in the defense response is priming. Plants pretreated by GLVs can induce a defense response more rapidly and effectively than unpretreated plants when they are damaged by pathogens or insects. In this study, we focused on the priming effects of GLVs on jasmonic acid response involved in the defense response. When Arabidopsis was pretreated with aldehyde GLVs, especially with (E)-2-hexenal, the anthocyanin content was significantly increased by a subsequent methyl jasmonate (MeJA) treatment. On the other hand, no effect of anthocyanin accumulation was observed for plants pretreated with alcohol GLVs. These results suggest that aldehyde GLVs, especially (E)-2-hexenal, could enhance sensitivity to MeJA in Arabidopsis.

Section snippets

Plant growth conditions

Arabidopsis thaliana ecotype Colombia (Col-0) was used for all experiments. The plant seeds were surface-sterilized, placed on petri dishes (60 seeds/dish) containing half-strength Murashige-Skoog (MS) medium adjusted to pH 5.8 and supplemented with 1.5% sucrose and 0.7% agar, and vernalized for 2 days at 4°C. After that, they were transferred to a growth chamber and grown at 23°C with fluorescent light (70–80 μmol m−2 s−1, 16 h light/8 h dark); 7-day-old seedlings were transferred into 100-ml

Effect of GLV pretreatment on anthocyanin content following MeJA treatment

In order to investigate a possible priming effect of GLVs on the MeJA response, we first selected two GLVs, (E)-2-hexenal and (Z)-3-hexenol, respectively known to induce defense-related genes in Arabidopsis and maize 18, 19. Since many plant species treated with MeJA produce secondary metabolites such as anthocyanins, which are biosynthesized from the flavonoid pathway (24), the anthocyanin content was measured as an index of MeJA response.

Pretreatment with GLVs was followed by MeJA treatment 7

Discussion

Plants immediately emit a variety of C6 and C9 GLVs when they are attacked by insects and pathogens 7, 9. It was reported previously that the levels of endogenous JA and emitted terpenes after treatment with an elicitor, a caterpillar regurgitant, were significantly increased by pretreatment with GLVs in maize (17). Similar results were reported for Arabidopsis pretreated with aldehyde GLVs, which showed a highly resistant response to Botrytis cinerea in an inoculation experiment (18).

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Nobuhiro Ikezawa (Osaka University, Osaka, Japan) and Ery Odette Fukushima (Yokohama City University, Kanagawa, Japan) for their useful comments on reading the manuscript.

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