Antioxidant Responses and Redox Regulation Within Plant-Beneficial Microbe Interaction

The increase in extreme climate events associated with global warming is a great menace to crop productivity nowadays. In addition to abiotic stresses, warmer conditions favor the spread of infectious diseases affecting plant performance. Within this context, beneficial microbes constitute a sustainable alternative for the mitigation of the effects of climate change on plant growth and productivity. Used as biostimulants to improve plant growth, they also increase plant resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses through the generation of a primed status in the plant, leading to a better and faster response to stress. In this review, we have focused on the importance of a balanced redox status for the adequate performance of the plant and revisited the different antioxidant mechanisms supporting the biocontrol effect of beneficial microbes through the adjustment of the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). In addition, the different tools for the analysis of antioxidant responses and redox regulation have been evaluated. The importance of redox regulation in the activation of the immune responses through different mechanisms, such as transcriptional regulation, retrograde signaling, and post-translational modification of proteins, emerges as an important research goal for understanding the biocontrol activity of the beneficial microbes.

M.-C.G.’s work is supported by Grant PID2020-115156GB-I00 from FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain. The work of C.P. and T.R. was supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation through the InRoot project within the Cooperative Crop Resiliency Program, Grant NNF19SA0059362. T.R. acknowledges the support by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic within the CzeCOS program, Grant number LM2023048.

Peer reviewed