Parthenium hysterophorus's Endophytes: The Second Layer of Defense against Biotic and Abiotic Stresses.

Parthenium hysterophorus L. is considered an obnoxious weed due to its rapid dispersal, fast multiplications, and agricultural and health hazards. In addition to its physio-molecular and phytotoxic allelochemical usage, this weed most probably uses endophytic flora as an additional line of defense to deal with stressful conditions and tolerate both biotic and abiotic stresses. The aim of this article is to report the diversity of endophytic flora (fungi and bacteria) in P. hysterophorus and their role in the stress mitigation (biotic and abiotic) of other important crops. Various endophytes were reported from P. hysterophorus and their roles in crops evaluated under biotic and abiotic stressed conditions. These endophytes have the potential to alleviate different stresses by improving crops/plants growth, development, biomass, and photosynthetic and other physiological traits. The beneficial role of the endophytes may be attributed to stress-modulating enzymes such as the antioxidants SOD, POD and APX and ACC deaminases. Additionally, the higher production of different classes of bioactive secondary metabolites, i.e., flavonoids, proline, and glutathione may also overcome tissue damage to plants under stressed conditions. Interestingly, a number of medicinally important phytochemicals such as anhydropseudo-phlegmcin-9, 10-quinone-3-amino-8-O methyl ether 'anhydropseudophlegmacin-9, 10-quinone-3-amino-8-Omethyl ether were reported from the endophytic flora of P. hysterophorus. Moreover, various reports revealed that fungal and bacterial endophytes of P. hysterophorus enhance plant growth-promoting attributes and could be added to the consortium of biofertilizers.

Amplification of genome-integrated BeYDV replicons by transient expression of Rep in Arabidopsis thaliana

Bean yellow dwarf geminivirus (BeYDV) has been used as a potential vector to improve foreign gene expression, specifically, to achieve higher yields of vaccine proteins in plants. Previously, we have shown that when the BeYDV replication initiator protein Rep was provided in trans, replication and gene expression of GUS were enhanced enormously from a BeYDV expression vector in a transient assay system. In this paper, transgenic lines of Arabidopsis (cv. Columbia) were generated harboring the BeYDV cis-acting elements required for replication. Constructs encoding BeYDV Rep or intronless Rep open reading frames (ORFs) were transiently introduced into transgenic plants via Agrobacterium-mediated infiltration in order to examine the relative levels of replication and expression of the genome-integrated GUS reporter gene. This study shows that expression of Rep protein was regulated in trans from a separate cassette which enabled the rescue, replication and enhancement of the genome-integrated GUS gene in transgenic Arabidopsis. We conclude that Rep expression can be effectively controlled in Arabidopsis plants, and that regulation of Rep expression can result in the amplification of a genome-integrated foreign gene by circumventing the negative effects of gene silencing.