Regulation of sugar transporter activity for antibacterial defense in Arabidopsis

Abstract

Dueling for sugars Bacteria thrive on sugar. So do plant cells. Yamada et al. now show how the fight for sugar plays out in the extracellular spaces around plant cells when pathogenic bacteria are invading the plant (see the Perspective by Dodds and Lagudah). In the model plant Arabidopsis , part of the defense response incited by the presence of pathogenic bacteria includes transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation of sugar transporters. The resulting uptake of monosaccharides from the extracellular space makes life a little bit more difficult for the invading bacteria. Science , this issue p. 1427 ; see also p. 1377