Abstract
Plants respond to physical injury, such as mechanical wounding or chewing by herbivores, by activating a variety of defense-related genes. The wound-responsive expression of these genes occurs not only in the wounded leaves (local response) but also in distal unwounded leaves. Furthermore, we found systemic induction of genes from wounded roots to distal unwounded leaves in the same plants. Analysis of Arabidopsis microarray (22k) revealed that 36 transcripts were up-regulated (5-fold difference) in unwounded leaves of plants whose roots were wounded. These transcripts encoded AtERF, WRKY, and other transcription factors. In addition, these up-regulated genes contained jasmonic acid (JA)-related genes such as LOX and Vsp. Such systemic responses of these JA-related genes were not observed in both JA-deficient and JA-insensitive mutants. These results suggest that JA signaling pathways also play an important role in wound-induced root-to-shoot communication in higher plants.
