antioxidant-response
Antioxidant response refers to the suite of biochemical mechanisms plants deploy to detect and neutralize reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other oxidative stressors. In plants, these responses are critical for surviving environmental challenges such as drought, high light intensity, pathogen attack, and temperature extremes, all of which trigger oxidative damage to cellular components. Understanding how plants regulate antioxidant pathways—including enzymatic defenses like superoxide dismutase and catalase as well as non-enzymatic compounds like ascorbate and glutathione—helps researchers develop strategies to improve stress tolerance and resilience in crops and wild species alike.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-05-06
Male and female liverworts respond differently to toxic cadmium contamination, with females absorbing more of the metal but males suffering greater damage. Adding glutathione (a natural antioxidant) from outside the plant helped reduce this stress in both sexes.
Female Marchantia polymorpha accumulated significantly more cadmium (82.97 ± 0.75 mg/kg) than male plants, indicating strong sex-dependent differences in metal uptake.
Despite lower cadmium accumulation, male plants exhibited greater physiological and morphological damage under cadmium stress, suggesting sex-specific tolerance mechanisms.
Exogenous application of glutathione (GSH) provided measurable remedial effects for both sexes, reducing cadmium-induced stress through transcriptomic and metabolomic pathway changes.
