Question

You have now started a company producing crops that require no pesticide use, as they express your protein. Unfortunately, production of this protein consumes a lot of resources within the cell, and as such, your crops will express the protein only at the specific locations where the target organism is present, and only while the organisms are present. Given that you are a start-up with little funding, you will be doing all of the science yourself. The first task in development of these crops is designing a signal transduction cascade to communicate the presence of target organisms on the plant surface. 1. Design a signal transduction cascade that communicates the presence of this pathogen on the surface of the plant. Your pathway must include the following features: a. A specific mechanism whereby the presence of specific target organism is communicated from the exterior of a cell to the interior. While you need not refer to specific actual molecules, you need to illustrate that initiation of the cascade will be specific to target organisms, and how this is accomplished in the cell. b. At least six steps, not including initiation, within the cascade itself; a single binding event must result in a 10,000-fold amplification of the signal. Indicate where in the pathway these amplifications occur. c. At least two points of negative regulation in the pathway, though you need not klarify the specific mechanisms whereby the regulation occurs. d. Result in the transcription of a protein that itself functions as a transcription factor, a molecule that facilitates the transcription of specific genes, that for the purposes of this assignment, will be called TF-136. You do not need to provide a detailed overview of transcription at this point.

Background information: You have discovered a protein that is capable of defending agricultural crops from a variety of insects known to negatively impact agriculture, while not creating resistance, not being harmful to non-target species, and exhibiting no negative environmental consequences.

I do not even understand where to begin with this. It has been made clear that creativity is allowed with this assignment, so long as the guidelines are followed. Please provide me with assistance and explain how this process works (if you are able to; if not, an answer is enough).

Answer 1

This works based on the immune system of the plant.There are signalling pathways through which a plant can recognise the pathogen.Plants like mammals lack mobile defender cells and somatic adaptive immune system.Instead they rely on the innate immunity of the cell.When the microorganism enter into the plant ,they pierce through the cell.The transmembrane pattern recognisation receptors recognise the pathogen associated molecular patterns in pathogen. After recognisation the cells will fight against the pathogens using that specific proteins.You can explain the transcription of the protein with the binding of RNA poly and DNA ligase aided with the binding of transcription factor to produce mRNA .and later the translation to produce the desired protein.To explain about negative regulation pathway,you can refer the protein production should be stopped so for that a negative regulation pathway is used.It is important to note that after recognisation of the pathogen the signal is amplified by the phosphorylation of various proteins.