The salicylic acid dependent and independent effects of NMD in plants
Samantha Rayson1, Mary Ashworth, Marta de Torres Zabala
1Centre for Plant Sciences, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
Abstract:
In eukaryotes, nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) targets aberrant and selected non-aberrant mRNAs for destruction. A recent screen for mRNAs showing increased abundance in Arabidopsis NMD-deficient mutants revealed that most are associated with the salicylic acid (SA)-mediated defense pathway. mRNAs with conserved peptide upstream open reading frames (CpuORFs or CuORFs) are hugely overrepresented among the smaller class of NMD-regulated transcripts not associated with SA. Here we show that the common phenotypes observed in Arabidopsis NMD mutants are SA-dependent, whereas the upregulation of CpuORF-containing transcripts in NMD mutants is independent of SA. We speculate that CpuORFs could allow the conditional targeting of mRNAs for destruction using the NMD pathway.
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