Is autophagy involved in ferroptosis-like cell death in plants?

DISTEFANO, AYELEN; LOPEZ, GABRIEL.; ZABALETA, EDUARDO J.; PAGNUSSAT, GABRIELA C.

Córdoba

Congreso; XXXII Reunión Argentina de Fisiología Vegetal (RAFV) y XVI Congreso Latinoamericano de Fisiología Vegetal .; 2018

In plants, regulated cell death plays critical roles duringdevelopment and is essential for responses toabiotic and biotic stresses. In our lab, we found that aprocess similar to ferroptosis, an iron-dependent, oxidativeprocess recently described in animal cells, is implicatedin heat-shock-induced regulated cell death.Analyses of heat shock treated (HS) Arabidopsis rootsshowed biochemical features that are hallmarks foranimal ferroptosis, such as the iron dependent accumulationof ROS and lipid ROS, and the depletion ofglutathione and ascorbic acid. As ferroptosis was foundto be an autophagic cell death processes in animals,we are now interested to found out if a similar processoccurs in plants. During autophagy, double membranevacuoles named autophagosome form and engulf portionsof the cytoplasm and transfer them to the vacuolefor degradation. Several ATG genes play a role in theformation of the autophagosome. In this work we analyzed:1) the behavior of autophagy plant markers afterinducing ferroptosis; 2) the effect of ferroptosis inhibitorson the autophagy flux following heat stress, and3) ferroptosis features in Arabidopsis plants impairedin ATG genes