Priming crops against biotic and abiotic stresses: MSB as a tool for studying mechanisms

Herbicide-related signaling in plants reveals novel insights for herbicide use strategies, environmental risk assessment and global change assessment challenges

“…Moreover, signaling or physiological relationships between herbicide responses, abiotic stresses and biotic stresses (Baena-González et al, 2007;Cortleven et al, 2014;Goossens et al, 2010;Ramel et al, 2007) indicate that impact of global change stressors on plant communities under conditions of diffuse herbicide contamination is difficult to predict and requires dedicated studies (Laliberté and Tylianakis, 2012). Paradoxically, signaling pathways involved in chemical priming against multiple abiotic stresses (Borges et al, 2014;Savvides et al, 2015) largely overlap with signaling pathways activated by low levels of herbicides or herbicide derivatives. Priming with chemical donors of reactive oxygen or nitrogen species (Savvides et al, 2015) activates oxidative stress response pathways as also occurs with hydroxyatrazine or low levels of glyphosate (Serra et al, , 2015b, and diverse cases of abiotic stress hardening after pre-treatment with low subtoxic levels of herbicides or pesticides have been described (Ford et al, 2010;Stamm et al, 2014).…”

“…For example, environmentally-observed soil residual levels of glyphosate (1.8 μM), AMPA (2.7 μM) or hydroxyatrazine (760 nM) activate the transcription of the gene encoding ABA degrading enzyme ABA 8′-hydroxylase , whose activity controls ABA levels and tolerance to drought and salinity stress (Horn et al, 2013). Finally, the effects of safener and chemical primer treatments (Borges et al, 2014;Riechers et al, 2010;Savvides et al, 2015) demonstrate that xenobiotic signaling effects can be effective in the field and in the environment.…”

Advances in induced resistance by natural compounds: towards new options for woody crop protection

“…In oilseed rape (Brassica napus) MSB is able to induce an enhancement of APX but no effect on PR-1 expression was observed, suggesting that resistance mediated by MSB in oilseed rape involves an enhanced production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) but is independent of PR-1 accumulation (Borges et al, 2003b). Moreover it has been suggested that the application of MSB is able to induce a reduction in insect growth rate which could be used for controlling Trioza erytreae and Diaphorina citri, the psyllid vectors of HLB (Borges et al, 2014).…”

Priming effect of menadione sodium bisulphite against salinity stress in Arabidopsis involves epigenetic changes in genes controlling proline metabolism

“…The generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is one of the early events during the establishment of priming against stressing environmental factors in plants (Pastor et al, 2013;Borges et al, 2014). Indeed, ROS-mediated signalling seems to be a common feature of plant response to stress (Pitzschke et al, 2006;Suzuki et al, 2012), although the mechanisms linking ROS generation and final response are so far not well established.…”

“…Hence, the oxidant activity of menadione is probably involved in the ability of MSB to promote stable epigenetic modifications in seed embryos that would be responsible for tolerance to salinity stress exhibited by adult plants. It would be interesting to investigate with a next-generation sequencing approach how many and which genomic sequences are epigenetically imprinted by MSB, and also the potential relationships of these genetic loci with the different types of resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses induced by this priming compound (Borges et al, 2014).…”