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XopJ is a Xanthomonas type III effector protein that promotes bacterial virulence on susceptible pepper plants through the inhibition of the host cell proteasome and a resultant suppression of salicylic acid (SA) - dependent defense responses. We show here that Nicotiana benthamiana leaves transiently expressing XopJ display hypersensitive response (HR) -like symptoms when exogenously treated with SA. This apparent avirulence function of XopJ was further dependent on effector myristoylation as well as on an intact catalytic triad, suggesting a requirement of its enzymatic activity for HR-like symptom elicitation. The ability of XopJ to cause a HR-like symptom development upon SA treatment was lost upon silencing of SGT1 and NDR1, respectively, but was independent of EDS1 silencing, suggesting that XopJ is recognized by an R protein of the CC-NBS-LRR class. Furthermore, silencing of NPR1 abolished the elicitation of HR-like symptoms in XopJ expressing leaves after SA application. Measurement of the proteasome activity indicated that proteasome inhibition by XopJ was alleviated in the presence of SA, an effect that was not observed in NPR1 silenced plants. Our results suggest that XopJ - triggered HR-like symptoms are closely related to the virulence function of the effector and that XopJ follows a two-signal model in order to elicit a response in the non-host plant N. benthamiana.
From a health and performance-related perspective, it is crucial to evaluate subjective symptoms and objective signs of acute training-induced immunological responses in young athletes. The limited number of available studies focused on immunological adaptations following aerobic training. Hardly any studies have been conducted on resistance-training induced stress responses. Therefore, the aim of this observational study was to investigate subjective symptoms and objective signs of immunological stress responses following resistance training in young athletes. Fourteen (7 females and 7 males) track and field athletes with a mean age of 16.4 years and without any symptoms of upper or lower respiratory tract infections participated in this study. Over a period of 7 days, subjective symptoms using the Acute Recovery and Stress Scale (ARSS) and objective signs of immunological responses using capillary blood markers were taken each morning and after the last training session. Differences between morning and evening sessions and associations between subjective and objective parameters were analyzed using generalized estimating equations (GEE). In post hoc analyses, daily change-scores of the ARSS dimensions were compared between participants and revealed specific changes in objective capillary blood samples. In the GEE models, recovery (ARSS) was characterized by a significant decrease while stress (ARSS) showed a significant increase between morning and evening-training sessions. A concomitant increase in white blood cell count (WBC), granulocytes (GRAN) and percentage shares of granulocytes (GRAN%) was found between morning and evening sessions. Of note, percentage shares of lymphocytes (LYM%) showed a significant decrease. Furthermore, using multivariate regression analyses, we identified that recovery was significantly associated with LYM%, while stress was significantly associated with WBC and GRAN%. Post hoc analyses revealed significantly larger increases in participants’ stress dimensions who showed increases in GRAN%. For recovery, significantly larger decreases were found in participants with decreases in LYM% during recovery. More specifically, daily change-scores of the recovery and stress dimensions of the ARSS were associated with specific changes in objective immunological markers (GRAN%, LYM%) between morning and evening-training sessions. Our results indicate that changes of subjective symptoms of recovery and stress dimensions using the ARSS were associated with specific changes in objectively measured immunological markers.
While the influence of spatial-numerical associations in number categorization tasks has been well established, their role in mental arithmetic is less clear. It has been hypothesized that mental addition leads to rightward and upward shifts of spatial attention (along the "mental number line"), whereas subtraction leads to leftward and downward shifts. We addressed this hypothesis by analyzing spontaneous eye movements during mental arithmetic. Participants solved verbally presented arithmetic problems (e.g., 2 + 7, 8-3) aloud while looking at a blank screen. We found that eye movements reflected spatial biases in the ongoing mental operation: Gaze position shifted more upward when participants solved addition compared to subtraction problems, and the horizontal gaze position was partly determined by the magnitude of the operands. Interestingly, the difference between addition and subtraction trials was driven by the operator (plus vs. minus) but was not influenced by the computational process. Thus, our results do not support the idea of a mental movement toward the solution during arithmetic but indicate a semantic association between operation and space.
Setting the PAS, the role of circadian PAS domain proteins during environmental adaptation in plants
(2015)
The per-ARNT-sim (PAS) domain represents an ancient protein module that can be found across all kingdoms of life. The domain functions as a sensing unit for a diverse array of signals, including molecular oxygen, small metabolites, and light. In plants, several PAS domain-containing proteins form an integral part of the circadian clock and regulate responses to environmental change. Moreover, these proteins function in pathways that control development and plant stress adaptation responses. Here, we discuss the role of PAS domain-containing proteins in anticipation, and adaptation to environmental changes in plants.
During the course of their ontogenesis plants are continuously exposed to a large variety of abiotic stress factors which can damage tissues and jeopardize the survival of the organism unless properly countered. While animals can simply escape and thus evade stressors, plants as sessile organisms have developed complex strategies to withstand them. When the intensity of a detrimental factor is high, one of the defense programs employed by plants is the induction of programmed cell death (PCD). This is an active, genetically controlled process which is initiated to isolate and remove damaged tissues thereby ensuring the survival of the organism. The mechanism of PCD induction usually includes an increase in the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) which are utilized as mediators of the stress signal. Abiotic stress-induced PCD is not only a process of fundamental biological importance, but also of considerable interest to agricultural practice as it has the potential to significantly influence crop yield. Therefore, numerous scientific enterprises have focused on elucidating the mechanisms leading to and controlling PCD in response to adverse conditions in plants. This knowledge may help develop novel strategies to obtain more resilient crop varieties with improved tolerance and enhanced productivity. The aim of the present review is to summarize the recent advances in research on ROS-induced PCD related to abiotic stress and the role of the organelles in the process.
It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue -based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.
Continuing advances in 'omics methodologies and instrumentation is enhancing the understanding of how plants cope with the dynamic nature of their growing environment. 'Omics platforms have been only recently extended to cover horticultural crop species. Many of the most widely cultivated vegetable crops belong to the genus Brassica: these include plants grown for their root (turnip, rutabaga/swede), their swollen stem base (kohlrabi), their leaves (cabbage, kale, pak choi) and their inflorescence (cauliflower, broccoli). Characterization at the genome, transcript, protein and metabolite levels has illustrated the complexity of the cellular response to a whole series of environmental stresses, including nutrient deficiency, pathogen attack, heavy metal toxicity, cold acclimation, and excessive and sub optimal irradiation. This review covers recent applications of omics technologies to the brassicaceous vegetables, and discusses future scenarios in achieving improvements in crop end-use quality.
Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. "too") in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.