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Article Addendum

PA, a stress-induced short cut to switch-on ethylene signalling by switching-off CTR1?

Christa Testerink, Paul B. Larsen, Fionn McLoughlin, Dieuwertje van der Does, John A.J. van Himbergen and Teun Munnik

volume 3 | issue 9

september 2008
Pages: 681 - 683

This is an open-access article

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Constitutive triple response 1 (CTR1) is a protein kinase that represses plant responses to ethylene. Recently, we have shown that CTR1 function is negatively regulated by the lipid second messenger phosphatidic acid (PA) in vitro. PA was shown to inhibit (1) CTR1’s protein kinase activity, (2) the intramolecular interaction between N-terminus and kinase domain, and (3) the interaction of CTR1 with the ethylene receptor ETR1. PA typically accumulates within minutes in response to biotic or abiotic stresses, which are known to induce ethylene formation. Although long-term treatment with ethephon does stimulate PA accumulation, our results show no fast increase in PA in response to ethylene. A speculative model is presented which explains how stress-induced PA formation could switch on downstream ethylene responses via interaction of the lipid with CTR1.