Abstract
Possible involvement of autophagy in immune responses and programmed cell death both in animals and plants have recently been discussed extensively. However, little is known on the dynamics and physiological significance of autophagy in plant innate immunity. Cryptogein, a proteinaceous elicitor from an oomycete, induces a series of cell cycle-dependent defense responses and hypersensitive cell death synchronously in tobacco BY-2 cells (Kadota et al. 2004), which provides a suitable model system to characterize dynamic intracellular cell biological events during innate immunity (Higaki et al. 2007; 2008). We established a BY-2 cell line in which dynamics of autophagosomes can be visualized with Atg8-YFP. We will report the effects of cryptogein on the dynamics of autophagy and possible involvement of autophagy in the regulation of cryptogein-induced defense responses and programmed cell death.
