Glutathione plays a pivotal role in protecting plants from environmental stresses, oxidative stress, xenobiotics, and some heavy metals. Arabidopsis plants treated with cadmium or copper responded by increasing transcription of the genes for glutathione synthesis, ␥ -glutamylcysteine synthetase and glutathione synthetase, as well as glutathione reductase. The response was specific for those metals whose toxicity is thought to be mitigated through phytochelatins, and other toxic and nontoxic metals did not alter mRNA levels. Feeding experiments suggested that neither oxidative stress, as results from exposure to H 2 O 2 , nor oxidized or reduced glutathione levels were responsible for activating transcription of these genes. Jasmonic acid also activated the same suite of genes, which suggests that it might be involved in the signal transduction pathway for copper and cadmium. Jasmonic acid treatment increased mRNA levels and the capacity for glutathione synthesis but did not alter the glutathione content in unstressed plants, which supports the idea that the glutathione concentration is controlled at multiple levels.
INTRODUCTIONGlutathione (GSH), the tripeptide ␥ -glutamylcysteinylglycine, is the major source of non-protein thiols in most plant cells (Bergmann and Rennenberg, 1993). GSH plays a central role in protecting plants from environmental stresses, including oxidative stress due to the generation of active oxygen species, xenobiotics, and some heavy metals.GSH is involved in quenching reactive oxygen species (Larson, 1988; Alscher, 1989; Foyer et al., 1994b). The ascorbate/GSH cycle reduces H 2 O 2 to water (Foyer and Halliwell, 1976; Alscher, 1989). Ascorbate is also important in maintaining ␣ -tocopherol in the reduced state and therefore links GSH to the dominant free radical scavenger in membranes (Hess, 1994). Plants detoxify many organic contaminants by conjugating them or their metabolites to GSH for storage or further metabolism (Lamoureux et al., 1994). These reactions are catalyzed by glutathione S -transferases (GSTs). Plants are protected from some metals, with cadmium and copper being the most studied, by a group of ␥ -glutamylcysteine ( ␥ -EC) peptides, the phytochelatins (PCs). These molecules have the general structure ( ␥ -Glu-Cys) 2-11 -Gly. They are formed by the polymerization of GSH catalyzed by the transpeptidase phytochelatin synthase (Grill et al., 1985(Grill et al., , 1987 Chen et al., 1997). The PCs bind metals in the cytosol, and the PC metal complex is sequestered in the vacuole (Rauser, 1990).GSH is synthesized from glutamate, cysteine, and glycine by a two-step ATP-dependent reaction (Meister and Anderson, 1983). The first reaction forms ␥ -EC from glutamate and cysteine by the enzyme ␥ -EC synthetase (Hell and Bergmann, 1990), which is encoded by gsh1 (May and Leaver, 1995). GSH is then synthesized by the ligation of ␥ -EC and glycine in the reaction catalyzed by the enzyme GSH synthetase, which is encoded by gsh2 (Wang and Oliver, 1996). When GSH is oxidized as part of ...