Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Analogous to animals' fight or flight response during stress, sessile land plants have developed a fight or fix module as a survival strategy. This has resulted in plants having a remarkable regenerative ability with pluripotent tissues that can heal wounds and replace damaged organs. The formation of callus is an important feature of plant pluripotency, and its stem-cell like properties offers a toolkit indispensable for grafting, genetic transformations and somatic embryogenesis. However, many plant species are recalcitrant to tissue culture-mediated regeneration or display incompatibility during grafting. Hence, identifying new compounds promoting regeneration activity is still of great importance.
In this study, a comprehensive analysis of the novel regeneration inducer fipexide (FPX), identified by Nakano et al. 2018, was performed. The substance was found to promote extreme callus formation with prolonged proliferation and found to induce genes required for pluripotency acquisition such as from the PLETHORA family. In addition, FPX induced the expression of pericycle-related genes, for instance GATA23, which also are responsible for callus formation and
pluripotency acquisition. This upregulation was also true for another piperazine, named ASP, that also was assessed in this study. Furthermore, both FPX and ASP were found to upregulate genes encoding transcription factors important during grafting and directly related to wound healing. The application of FPX also improved the attachment rate in tomato heterografts. Taken together, this study unravels the regenerative activities of piperazines and sheds light on a novel tool that induces callus formation and pluripotency in a different manner than traditional methods of direct application of hormone mixtures.