Abstract

The Fusarium genus of fungi is responsible for commercially devastating crop diseases and the contamination of cereals with harmful mycotoxins. Fusarium mycotoxins aid infection, establishment, and spread of the fungus within the host plant. We investigated the effects of the Fusarium mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) on the viability of Arabidopsis cells. Although it is known to trigger apoptosis in animal cells, DON treatment at low concentrations surprisingly did not kill these cells. On the contrary, we found that DON inhibited apoptosis-like programmed cell death (PCD) in Arabidopsis cells subjected to abiotic stress treatment in a manner independent of mitochondrial cytochrome c release. This suggested that Fusarium may utilise mycotoxins to suppress plant apoptosis-like PCD. To test this, we infected Arabidopsis cells with a wild type and a DON-minus mutant strain of F. graminearum and found that only the DON producing strain could inhibit death induced by heat treatment. These results indicate that mycotoxins may be capable of disarming plant apoptosis-like PCD and thereby suggest a novel way that some fungi can influence plant cell fate.

Keywords

fusarium mycotoxin programmed cell death

Published in

PLoS ONE
2013, Volume: 8, number: 7, article number: e69542
Publisher: PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

UKÄ Subject classification

Cell Biology
Botany
Microbiology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0069542

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/73919