Oxygen transfer rate identifies priming compounds in parsley cells

Area of Science:

• Plant Science
• Agricultural Chemistry
• Biotechnology

Background:

• Growing demand for sustainable agriculture necessitates reduced fungicide/pesticide use due to pathogen resistance.
• Plant defense priming offers a cost-effective strategy, enhancing plant immunity without high fitness costs.
• Current methods for identifying plant activators are slow, invasive, and rely on late-stage detection.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and validate a novel, noninvasive method for identifying plant defense priming compounds.
• To demonstrate the efficacy of the Respiration Activity Monitoring System (RAMOS) in detecting plant activator activity.
• To correlate metabolic activity changes with defense priming in plant cell cultures.

Main Methods:

• Utilized RAMOS for noninvasive, quasi-continuous online monitoring of oxygen transfer rate (OTR) in parsley cell cultures.
• Applied known plant activator salicylic acid (SA) and defense elicitor Pep13 to assess OTR changes.
• Correlated OTR measurements with furanocoumarin phytoalexin secretion using fluorescence spectroscopy.

Main Results:

• RAMOS successfully detected increased OTR upon treatment with salicylic acid (SA), a known plant activator.
• SA-primed parsley cells exhibited significantly higher OTR peaks upon Pep13 challenge compared to unprimed cells.
• A strong correlation was observed between enhanced oxygen consumption and the capacity to prime Pep13-induced furanocoumarin secretion.

Conclusions:

• RAMOS provides a noninvasive measure of plant cell metabolic activity, reflecting defense status.
• Enhanced oxygen consumption in parsley cells correlates with induced defense priming and phytoalexin production.
• RAMOS is a promising novel technology for the high-throughput screening of plant activators in agriculture.