wound-response
Wound-response refers to the suite of molecular and physiological reactions plants deploy when tissues are damaged by herbivores, pathogens, or environmental stressors. Understanding these mechanisms is central to plant biology because they reveal how plants coordinate both local defenses—such as cell-wall reinforcement—and systemic signaling through hormones like jasmonic acid and abscisic acid. Research in this area has broad implications for crop protection, as engineering or eliciting natural wound responses could reduce agricultural losses without synthetic pesticides.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-04-29
When plants are wounded, they release two chemical alarm signals — extracellular ATP and the amino acid glutamic acid — that activate largely separate defense pathways depending on which tissue is damaged. Unexpectedly, the glutamic acid pathway suppresses the ATP pathway, revealing that plant wound signaling is more layered and self-regulating than previously understood.
Extracellular ATP and L-glutamic acid trigger almost entirely non-overlapping sets of wound-response genes in distant tissues, despite both being released during injury.
Reactive oxygen species production after injury in non-vascular tissues depended primarily on ATP receptors (P2K1/P2K2), while vascular tissue injury responses depended primarily on glutamic acid receptors (GLR3.3/GLR3.6).
Plants lacking both glutamic acid receptors showed a significantly enhanced reactive oxygen species response to ATP, demonstrating that the glutamic acid signaling pathway actively suppresses the ATP signaling pathway.
