Abstract
A growing body of evidence shows that nitric oxide (NO) and NO-derived reactive nitrogen species (RNS) act as both physiological regulators and stressors in various aspects of plant life. Owing to the reactive nature of NO and RNS, plant cells are apparently equipped with metabolic mechanism to enable them to cope with these bioactive molecules for both modulation of NO-mediated signal transduction and self-protection against reactive nitrogen toxicity. However, our current knowledge is quite limited concerning the molecular, biochemical and physiological bases of such plant metabolism. We will introduce a recent progress of our work on a plant metabolic basis for RNS as well as current status of related research, and discuss its future perspectives.
