Receptors
The part of the plants, animal, or microbe that first senses an abiotic stress factor is a receptor. Once a signal is picked up by a receptor, a lot of different things can happen. Signals are transmitted intercellularly and then they activate nuclear transcription to get the effects of a certain set of genes. These genes that are activated allow the plant to respond to the stress that it is experiencing. Even though none of the receptors for cold, drought, salinity or the stress hormone abscisic acid in plants is known for sure, the knowledge that we have today shows that receptor-like protein kinases, two-component histidine kinases, as well as G-protein receptors may be the possible sensors of these different signals.
Receptor like kinases can be found in plants as well as animals. There are many more RLKs in plants than there are in animals. They are also a little bit different. Unlike animal RLKs that usually possess tyrosine signature sequences, plant RLKs have serine or threonine signature sequences (Xiong & Zhu, 2001).
Read more about this topic: Natural Stress
Famous quotes containing the word receptors:
“Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)