RNA Signaling in Plants

Plants have evolved a long-distance vascular superhighway to transport sugars, metabolites, proteins and RNAs. Some of these molecules are implicated in systemic signalling and play essential roles in plant development, growth and responses to biotic and abiotic environments. An emerging field in plant signaling is RNA as molecular signals. RNA trafficking is involved in systemic signaling that controls plant development and defence against pathogen infection. Hundreds of RNA transcripts have been recently identified in the phloem of plants, suggesting phloem-mobile RNAs may act as long-distance signalling molecules. Systemic movement of several cellular mRNAs has been found to regulate leaf architecture and tuberization. These RNAs represent a non cell-autonomous and long-distance mobile signal. Furthermore, small interfering RNAs are components of intercellular and systemic signals for innate RNA silencing defence and miRNAs are mobile too. On the other hand, RNA trafficking is also critical for plant viruses and viroids to establish systemic infection and replication-independent viral RNA can move in plants.

Therefore this Research Topics welcomes world-class submissions (Original Research, Hypothesis & Theory, Methods, Reviews and so on) to report cutting-edge researches on intra- and intercellular as well as systemic RNA signaling, innovative technologies to investigate RNA mobility and biological significance of RNA signaling in plants.