New insights into nitric oxide biosynthesis underpin lateral root development

Abstract

In recent years, nitric oxide (NO) has emerged as a key redox signaling molecule in plants functioning in the regulation of key developmental programs and the orchestration of responses to a plethora of environmental cues (Kolbert et al., 2019). The predominant route for the transfer of NO bioactivity is through S-nitrosylation, the addition of an NO moiety to a protein cysteine thiol to form an S-nitrosothiol (Yun et al., 2011). Specificity for this process is established by the structural constraints imposed by tertiary protein structure in gating access to given cysteine redox switches and associated proteins that can either facilitate the addition or removal of the NO moiety at these residues (Umbreen et al., 2018).