ABA receptors: Light at the end of the tunnel

MUSCHIETTI, JORGE; MCCORMICK, SHEILA

Faculty of 1000 reports

FACULTY OF 1000

Año: 2009 vol. 2 p. 2 - 5

1757-594X

The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) plays a role in several aspects of plant growth anddevelopment. Understanding how this hormonal stimulus is sensed and transduced turned out to beone of the major tasks in the field of plant signaling. A series of recent papers proposed severaldifferent proteins that could receive the ABA signal and initiate the signaling cascade. The winnerappears to be PYR/PYL/RCAR (PYrabactin Resistance/PYrabactin Resistance-Like/RegulatoryComponent of Abscisic acid Receptor) proteins, as crystal structures were recently published.The crystal structures support the idea that upon ABA binding to a PYR/PYL/RCAR protein, theactivity of a phosphatase 2C, with known repressive activity on ABA signaling, is inhibited