Plants spice up their sex life with defensins
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - 17:01
in Biology & Nature
Since the beginning, plants and animals have deployed various mechanisms to fight pathogens. Proteins have always played an important part in this armoury, and a broad variety of defensin proteins have become part of the immune system of plants, insects and other animals except mammals. Now scientists from Regensburg discovered that those proteins also play a role in the "sex life" during the fertilization process of plants. These findings will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology.