Rice and tobacco read the same hormone signal differently
Plant Signaling
The grass in your lawn and the tomatoes in your garden bed belong to two fundamentally different plant lineages that respond to weed killers and growth signals in distinct ways, which is exactly why some herbicides wipe out broadleaf weeds while leaving your turf grass untouched.
Plants have an internal hormone called auxin that controls how they grow, and a common herbicide called quinclorac works by hijacking this hormone system. Researchers looked at which genes turned on and off in rice, a grass, versus tobacco, a broadleaf plant, after exposure to this herbicide, and found the two plants activate very different sets of genes in response. This helps explain why the same chemical can be a precise weed killer in some crops and harmless in others.
Key Findings
RNA-seq was used to compare genome-wide transcriptional responses to quinclorac in rice (a monocot) and tobacco (a dicot)
The two species showed distinct patterns of gene expression changes following auxin-herbicide treatment
Findings highlight fundamental differences in how monocots and dicots process auxin signaling pathways
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists compared how rice and tobacco plants respond at the genetic level to a weed-killing chemical that mimics a plant growth hormone, revealing that grass-like plants and broadleaf plants process this signal in very different ways.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
RNA-seq of rice and tobacco with auxin treatment
To understand the differences in the responses of monocots and dicots to auxin, we compared the transcriptomes of rice and tobacco treated with the herbicide quinclorac using RNA-seq.
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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