Plants spice up their sex life with defensins

Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - 10:51 in Biology & Nature

Since the beginning, plants and animals have deployed various mechanisms to fight pathogens. Proteins have always played an important part in this armoury, and a broad variety of defensin proteins have become part of the immune system of plants, insects and other animals except mammals. Now scientists from Regensburg discovered that those proteins also play a role in the 'sex life' during the fertilisation process of plants. These findings will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology...

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