Insights into the Participation of Nitric Oxide and Extra Cellular ATP in Wounding

Abstract

In natural environments, wounding represents an abiotic stress that in plants is tightly related to biotic factors such as, herbivory and insect feeding. Wounding also regularly occurs during harvesting, storage and handling of fresh crop products. A proper wound-healing response is critical to restore optimal health and physiological conditions aimed to facilitate plants to overcome the adverse condition-associated challenges. Wounding and wound-healing responses have been characterized in mammals as well as in plants, and the role of some key molecules has been established in the last years. Extracellular ATP (eATP) coming from other injured cells has been described as a wound signal also in animals and plants. At the same time, oxidative and nitrosative signals contribute to the mentioned pathway; the small gaseous and free radical reactive nature of nitric oxide (NO) allows it to participate in a plethora of relevant molecular and cellular reactions even in eATP-mediated responses. In this chapter, we shortly reviewed the participation of eATP and NO as players of an orchestrated complex net of events occurring downstream wounding in plants. A brief discussion on the interplay between ROS/RNS and Ca2+ as counterpart signal molecules is also presented.